Storms make aid delivery to tsunami area harrowing

MENTAWAI ISLANDS, Indonesia – A group of private aid workers battled fierce swells and driving rain that kept most craft on shore, managing to deliver food and other supplies to desperate survivors on the islands hardest hit by a tsunami that killed at least 413 people.

Government agencies pulled back boats and helicopters Friday that had been ferrying aid to the most distant corners of the Mentawai islands and resorted to air-dropping boxes of aid from planes.

On a borrowed 75-foot cruiser, aid workers faced rough seas and sheets of rain – plus miserable seasickness – to bring noodles, sardines and sleeping mats to villages that have not received any help since Monday’s earthquake. In one village, most people were still huddling in a church in the hills, too afraid to come down even to get the aid.

Dozens of injured survivors of the tsunami, meanwhile, languished at an overwhelmed hospital. They lay on mats or the bare floor as rainwater dripped onto them from holes in the ceiling and intravenous tubes hung from plastic ropes strung from the rafters.

“We need doctors, specialists,” nurse Anputra said at the tiny hospital in Pagai Utara – one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain slammed by the tsunami, which was triggered by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake.

The toll from the earthquake and the tsunami it spawned rose to 413 today as officials found more bodies, and 163 people were still missing and feared swept out to sea, said Suryadi, a Crisis Center official.

He said 23,000 survivors on the islands are homeless.