Thousands of residents in Nagappattinam began fleeing the town as the warning came in. Police ordered hundreds of vehicles carrying relief supplies not to enter. Similar warnings were issued for southern Kerala state and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, but there was no confirmation that new seismic waves were generated.

In his first public comments on the Sunday catastrophe, Bush said from his Texas ranch: "This has been a terrible disaster. I mean, it's just beyond our comprehension to think about how many lives have been lost." He pledged that the United States will "stand with the affected governments as they care for the victims."

At the United Nations, a humanitarian coordinator said that the world must join together immediately to deal with one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. "Coordination is now vital," Jan Egeland, of the United Nations, said. "The casualty number is rising by the hour."

Egeland said his organization has asked for an immediate $130 million to help the areas hardest hit by the disaster, including Indonesia and Sri Lanka. He also said the United Nations would launch an appeal early next month to raise more than $1 billion for relief.

Soldiers in Madras, India, load cans of water for shipment to Sri Lanka. There is a scarcity of drinking water in Sri Lanka, where many areas have had their wells inundated with seawater. M. Lakshman • Associated Press

Thousands of foreign tourists, many of whom had sought sunny beaches as a respite from dark northern European winters, are among the missing.

In the days after the disaster, Indonesia has emerged as the most devastated in terms of lives lost. A U.N. official estimated that the country's death toll could reach 80,000 once authorities are able to get into areas cut off from assistance. Authorities said the cleanup effort was plagued by continuing fuel shortages and the unwillingness of residents to help collect bodies for fear of finding their family members.

The first Indonesian military teams reached the city of Meulaboh on yesterday and found what was described as thousands of bodies. Michael Elmquist, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Indonesia, said that as many as 40,000 people might have died in Meulaboh, a city of about 100,000 people on Sumatra's west coast south of Banda Aceh. Elmquist said he based his estimate on an aerial survey of the city.

And confirming the worst fears for the Sumatran coast, a helicopter flight by a military commander for the region revealed village after village covered with sea water, flattened homes and only a handful of survivors in the rubble.

International aid and foreign doctors began trickling into the hard-hit Indonesian province of Aceh as the first two Australian military cargo planes landed here in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. But little food or medical assistance appeared to be reaching camps where thousands of survivors have taken refuge.

The government accelerated efforts to collect rotting corpses from the debris-strewn streets of Banda Aceh, dispatching 40 trucks to pick up bodies.

Aceh has been under strict military control for the past 18 months as the Indonesian army battles separatist rebels. Few outsiders have been allowed into the province, but that is changing. Dozens of foreign journalists have raced to the region. Medical teams from Singapore, Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan also have arrived.

At the airport, hundreds of boxes of rice, noodles and bottled water were piled up waiting to go to refugee camps, but no distribution system had been set up to deliver the goods. The officer in charge said he gives supplies to the camps that send a truck and ask for them.

At a camp set up on the grounds of television station TVRI, about 2,000 refugees were subsisting on the small amounts of food they were able to take from their homes and a meager supply of rice handed out by the Indonesian Red Cross. Student volunteers dispensed aspirin or amoxicillin to refugees who complained of illness. The camp has no latrines.

A mile up the road at Mata Ie a camp set up by the Indonesian military, dozens of injured refugees lay on cots in the medical tent but there was no doctor to treat them. The smell of death hung over the hospital, where workers were starting to bury more than 500 bodies. Dozens of patients lay on cots and wooden benches in the corridors and the lobby. Bloody bandages lay on the dirty floor.

The desire to bury each body in a shroud, according to Muslim tradition, has caused shortages. "That's why we don't have any more sheets in this hospital," a doctor said.

In Thailand, officials said that as many as 3,000 people, many of them foreign tourists, might have died at Khao Lak on the country's southern coast. More than 1,800 bodies have been recovered at the resort, which is popular with both Western and Asian tourists.

In India, officials estimate that about 12,500 people have died, although only 7,000 have been confirmed. Authorities fear as many as 7,000 might have died in a cluster of more than 550 islands, but have not yet reached all that are inhabited.

In Sri Lanka, the body count continued to rise as rescue workers reported 743 more deaths, lifting the nation's official toll to 22,493, according to the National Disaster Management Center in Colombo, the capital. But the increase was far less than previous days. The center also reported 8,600 people had been injured, with several thousand still missing.

Aid, meanwhile, has started to arrive in Sri Lanka in substantial quantities, government officials and aid workers said, providing some faint hope to hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans left homeless, injured or grieving for loved ones.