Flooding hampers aid efforts

BANDA ACEH, INDONESIA - US Navy helicopters, unable to land in flooded, tsunami-ravaged Indonesian villages, dropped aid yesterday to desperate crowds clamouring for the life-saving parcels.

Seven days after the massive undersea quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered giant waves across the Indian Ocean, relief pledges edged towards US$2 billion ($2.8 billion) and the death toll of nearly 127,000 was expected to rise.

Flash floods cut off aid to Sri Lankan villages and refugee camps, forcing residents to flee and increasing the threat of disease among millions of displaced survivors.

"The carnage is of a scale that defies comprehension," President George W. Bush said in his weekly radio address.

After an initial lax response from wealthy countries, the new year brought a generous about-turn, with contributions doubling in 24 hours.

Washington increased its pledge ten-fold to US$350 million, and Japan vowed US$500 million.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, calling the cataclysm the "largest disaster we have had to deal with", said the reconstruction process would probably take five to 10 years. He planned to visit Indonesia, the hardest-hit country, on Thursday and would probably issue a planned world appeal for more relief from there, officials said.

Five million people are short of water, food or basic sanitation across the region, and WHO crisis chief David Nabarro said a further 50,000 deaths from disease and other causes were likely.

A huge aid effort targeted Banda Aceh, a city of 400,000 on the northern tip of Sumatra, with two-thirds of the tsunami's known victims living in or near it.

US Sea Hawk helicopters from aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln joined military planes from Australia and Singapore in airlifts of aid.

Supplies that had been stacked up at the airport in Banda Aceh, for want of onward transport, were reaching the city itself, but little was making it by land to people in more remote areas.

In Sri Lanka, the worst-hit nation after Indonesia, the United States is sending up to 1500 marines and a mini-aircraft carrier with some 20 helicopters to assist in relief and reconstruction of the island nation, where heavy rains have compounded the misery and hampered aid efforts.

Carol Bellamy, head of the United Nations' children's agency, Unicef, said special attention should be paid to children.

"It is hard to imagine the fear, confusion and desperation of children who have seen enormous waves wash away their worlds," she said.

More than 28,700 people died in Sri Lanka, and nearly 13,000 in India, as confirmed tolls crept up from the magnitude-9 quake centred 150km off Banda Aceh.

In a teeming refugee camp in Banda Aceh, dozens of photographs are taped around a security post that has become a shrine to the missing and a meeting point to swap information.

Adnan Ibrahim, 62, was searching for his 17-year-old son. "I have been trying to find him for seven days. The boy is very smart. He is good with computers," said Ibrahim, sobbing.

In Thailand, the tsunami killed 4800 people, roughly half of them foreign tourists. Sweden, which has lost hundreds of its nationals, said the total number of Western tourists killed in Thailand could exceed 4600.

Hundreds of Germans, Danes, Norwegians and Italians were also among the missing.

Thailand drafted in elephants to help with heavy lifting, and prisoners to join the stomach-churning task of retrieving thousands of bodies strewn along its beaches - offering them two days off their sentence for each day worked.

Relatives and friends flying to Asia in the hope of finding loved ones scoured gruesome mosaics of photographs of distorted faces pinned on bulletin boards.

"Please tell your friends not to come," a tourist policeman told them over a loudspeaker at Phuket town hall rescue centre. "The bodies are no longer identifiable."

But forensic teams persevered with the task of trying to identify bloated, rotting bodies.

"We don't know where the end is," said Dutch police officer Pieter Wiersinsa.

Amid the heartache are happier tales of survival and reunion.

Ten tourists from Britain, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland were found alive on tiny Weh island, off Aceh.

"We suddenly saw huge waves around 10m tall coming to the shore.

"We ran for our lives," said a British surfer.

- REUTERS