BANDA ACEH, Indonesia -- A top Indonesian emergency official says waves from Sunday's earthquake killed 10,000 people in a single village.
The country now says 19,000 of its people died in the devastating tsunamis. That drives the overall number of known deaths to about 44,000 in a dozen countries in south Asia and Africa.
Emergency workers have been pulling bodies from a mangled train in Sri Lanka. Officials say the waves swatted the train from its tracks. Officials say about a-thousand people were on the train and they've recovered more than 200 bodies so far.
The 9.0 magnitude quake was centered off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, but the impact was felt thousands of miles away.
The new International Red Cross figures are based on tallies from government and other sources. Hardest hit was Sri Lanka, where 12,000 deaths have been recorded.
India had 6,000 deaths.
The surging seas stretched as far away as Africa, where hundreds are feared dead in Somalia. A Somali presidential spokesman said entire coastal villages have vanished.
Across southern Asia, beaches have been turned into open-air mortuaries, even as the search for the living continues.
More than 800 deaths have been recorded in Thailand, where warships were sent to check remote tropical resorts for survivors.
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Asian earthquake
Watch clips from some footage of the tidal waves' aftermath.
 
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Tourists, cars and homes were swept away by walls of water.
Meanwhile, chaos erupted at one Thai airport as hundreds of tourists -- many wounded and weeping -- tried to board planes for the capital.
Witnesses said they saw water rising slowly at first, before suddenly swelling.
Frenchmen Philippe Gilbert, who was vacationing in Sri Lanka, said he watched helplessly as a huge wave carried off his granddaughter. Gilbert said he gripped a tree and held his breath when a giant wave hit his beachside bungalow. He said he watched his four-year-old granddaughter disappear.
Gilbert described the wave as “absolutely monstrous.''
Deadly tidal waves, or tsunami, often set off by undersea earthquakes, have caused several major disasters in coastal communities over the years.
References to these waves date back as far as ancient Greece and Rome, including a wave that shook the Eastern Mediterranean on July 21, 365, killing thousands of residents of Alexandria, Egypt.
Possible health epidemics
A new killer could emerge from the debris and unburied bodies of Sunday's monster earthquake and waves -- health epidemics.
The aftermath of the disaster includes a spectacle of filth and looming disease. Decaying bodies, people relieving themselves in the open and polluted water are just a few of the problems.
A microbiologist in India says the risk of epidemics is veryhigh, since the decaying bodies are what he called "bacteria factories."
In India alone, hundreds of bodies lie in the streets and onbeaches.
Steve Aswin of UNICEF says the bodies of the dead should simply be buried in mass graves but there is often no one to do it.
UNICEF says it's concerned about the possible spread of waterborne diseases and is sending anti-diarrhea medicine in its aid shipments.
