The military was preparing to dig mass graves on Wednesday on Indonesia's battered Sumatra Island, where the vice-president estimated the death toll from an earthquake and tsunamis could rise to 40,000.
Food shortages and disease, meanwhile, in the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra's northern tip posed looming threats as government officials expressed concern that aid was not reaching the quake-devasted city of Banda Aceh fast enough.
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"The number of victims could go as high as 40,000, because many of the regions along the western coast of Sumatra cannot be reached," he said, adding that as many as 500,000 were injured in the disaster.
Bulldozers stood ready to bury the thousands of dead bodies that littered the streets and lined the front lawns of government offices in Banda Aceh. With the threat of disease on the rise and few ways to identify the dead, officials said they had no choice to but start burying them in mass graves, said military Col. Achmad Yani Basuki.
"We will start digging the mass graves today (Wednesday)," he said.