Gurinder Osan, Associated Press
	People look at boats destroyed by tidal waves at the harbor in Nagappattinam, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu earlier today. More than 55,000 people are reported dead around southern Asia most killed by massive tidal waves that smashed coastlines after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia's coast on Sunday, followed by aftershocks in the region.
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	Tatan Syuflana, Associated Press
	An airport crew member prepares relief supplies to transport to Aceh Province at Halim Perdana Kesumah Airforce base in Jakarta earlier today. Indonesia has so far confirmed the deaths of around 5,000 people as a result of Sunday's quake and the tsunamis it triggered across Asia and Africa. Most of the deaths in Indonesia recorded so far have been in Aceh province, on the northern tip of Sumatra Island.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Devastated coastal areas across South Asia struggled yesterday to prevent hunger and outbreaks of disease as dazed survivors searched desperately for the missing after a massive tsunami surged across the region. The death toll rose to more than 55,000, many of them in Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Sri Lankan officials said the freakish, earthquake-driven waves had killed nearly 11,000 people here and left many more injured or missing. They appealed for international aid to cope with a disaster that they declared was beyond their ability to handle on their own.

While southern and eastern portions of Sri Lanka were hard-hit, the tsunami killed people in 10 countries from Malaysia -- near the epicenter of the quake that struck Sunday morning off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra -- to Somalia, on Africa's east coast more than 3,000 miles away.

The International Committee of the Red Cross put the death toll across South Asia at 23,700 and warned of the potential for waterborne diseases such as cholera.

There were warnings throughout the affected area that the death toll might spike sharply higher. In an interview yesterday, Indonesia's vice president, Jusuf Kalla, said after touring stricken towns and villages in the province of Aceh that about 20,000 people may have died in Indonesia. Kalla's estimate, although not confirmed, was four times higher than the death toll previously offered by Indonesian officials, who reported earlier yesterday that about 5,000 people had perished in the province, located at the western end of Sumatra.

In the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, the large downtown park surrounding the city's central mosque was heaped with debris, including the remains of damaged houses and motorcycles. Many people took shelter under the mosque's black onion domes while thousands of others sought refuge in smaller mosques and schools.

Across the region, said Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, the quake and ensuing tsunami had affected millions of people and put the financial cost of the disaster in the billions. "We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone," he told reporters.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that eight Americans were among the dead.

In India, officials yesterday put the death toll at more than 4,000 and as high as 7,000. Among the known dead, there were about 3,400 fatalities in the state of Tamil Nadu, where hundreds of fishermen were swept out to sea, as were strollers on a popular beach in Chennai, formerly known as Madras, the state capital. South of the capital, bulldozers dug mass graves for victims, including children, while desperate parents combed hospitals and morgues in search of those still missing. Rescue workers pulled bloated corpses from the sea and brought them ashore in motorboats.

As in Indonesia, Indian officials cautioned that the toll could continue to rise significantly. They expressed particular concern about the fate of residents of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Bay of Bengal, which have spotty communications with the mainland.

Later yesterday, a police official told the private NDTV television that 3,000 people might have died in the islands, a figure that would push India's total to 7,000.

In Thailand, the Interior Ministry reported that 866 people had died, more than 4,000 had been injured and that thousands more were unaccounted for, the Associated Press reported. One of the dead was identified as Poom Jensen, 21, the Thai American grandson of King Bhumipol Adulyadej. Many of the victims were foreigners vacationing on tourist resorts in Thailand's southern islands.

"I sat on that beach and I watched and waited," said Mark Hayward, a Canadian advertising executive who was vacationing on Karon Beach, a major resort area on Phuket's west coast. The wave destroyed his hotel. "I never saw a police truck go by. I never saw a fire truck go by. It was three hours before the first vehicle with flashing lights came by."

In Malaysia, authorities reported that waves had killed at least 52 people, including an unknown number of foreign tourists. In Burma, 34 people reportedly were killed; in Bangladesh, two; the Maldives, 52; in Seychelles, three; and in Somalia, where coastal villages were reported to have been inundated, at least 14 and as many as 100 were killed.

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake Sunday morning was the fourth most severe since 1900, and the strongest since a 9.2 magnitude temblor in Alaska in 1964, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.