RELIEF WORKERS FIND DEVASTATION

Thursday, December 30, 2004 Posted: 1:55 AM EST (0655 GMT)

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (CNN) -- U.N. relief workers have arrived in Indonesia's Aceh province to find devastation in the region closest to the epicenter of the earthquake that spawned Sunday's killer tsunamis.

With 80,000 already reported dead in southern Asia and East Africa -- more than 45,000 in Indonesia alone -- the emergency workers reported that in some parts of Aceh, as many as one in every four citizens was dead.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the total number of dead could easily grow beyond 100,000.

Scenes of destruction -- homes and businesses flattened, buses tossed about like toys, piles of rubble filling the streets -- were repeated across the region, as were the scenes of grief -- residents and vacationers searching in vain for loved ones, or, at times, finding them in makeshift morgues.

Aceh province, nearly inaccessible in the best of times because of its remoteness and the presence for years of an armed insurgency, was all the more so after Sunday's disaster.

The events began just before 7 a.m. (midnight GMT Saturday) when a massive earthquake -- at 9.0, the strongest in the world since 1964 -- struck just 160 kilometers (100 miles) off Aceh's coast.

The tsunami swamped shores, villages, the jungle and Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, which was was almost completely destroyed.

Boats slammed into bridges and bodies were left lying on the streets or still buried beneath rubble left behind when the water subsided, CNN's Mike Chinoy reported.

Dino Patti Djalal, spokesman for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said the Indonesian military's 30,000-person force in the province was devastated.

"The military and the police were hard hit. Hundreds were killed," he said. "One military helicopter survived."

Djalal said aid is now arriving in the devastated province, but Chinoy said the capital showed little signs of it.

And the aftershocks continued, dozens of them, four days after the initial event.

Two of those -- both since 7 a.m. (midnight GMT Tuesday) -- topped 6.0 magnitude and were centered in India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of the same chain as Sumatra.