Thursday, 30 December 2004
A Red Cross Web site to aid contact between survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and their families in the region and across the world went into service on Wednesday.
The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said its site -- www.familylinks.icrc.org -- was already getting an active response and registrations were building up fast as its existence became known.
"It is important that both families at home and people in the tsunami region who have survived get to know about it quickly," ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal told Reuters.
The site has special sections for the four worst-affected countries -- Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and India -- where the overwhelming majority of the nearly 70,000 deaths so far have been reported.
Tens of thousands of tourists escaping the winter chill in Europe and North America were holidaying in resorts around the region when Sunday's huge underwater earthquake off the western tip of Indonesia caused the deadly waves.
Some 3,500 visitors from outside the region are still unaccounted for -- more than 2,000 of them from Scandinavia alone -- and government disaster officials in Thailand say at least 473, and perhaps many more, died there.
Most registrations so far show people being sought from the U.S. west coast state of California and Canada's Yukon Territory through Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi in the Middle East to Japan.
29 December 2004 |
Thursday, 30 December 2004
Geneva
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