Thousands without food
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – Thousands of survivors of last week’s earthquake and tsunami were still without food, water and basic medical care Wednesday throughout Indonesia’s devastated Aceh province, despite a massive U.S.-led aid effort and international assistance pledges that reached $3 billion.
Medical care remained largely unavailable along much of the 120-mile stretch of coast hit hardest by the underwater earthquake and the deadly waves that came crashing ashore afterward.
Injured refugees reported walking for days before reaching medical help, and volunteers returning from devastated towns said they encountered many refugees too weak or hurt to seek help. The refugees are subsisting on coconut milk and whatever food they can scavenge from the ruins, the volunteers said.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush took an aerial tour of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. Powell declared the devastation worse than anything he’s ever seen.
“I’ve been through war and I’ve been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other operations, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said after his 30-minute helicopter tour.
“I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave,” Powell said. “The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing.”
Bush, whose state suffered through a series of hurricanes last year, was equally stunned.
“Our hearts are with you and we will be with you in the long haul,” he said. “The American people and our government will continue to provide relief, but we will be part of the recovery efforts as well.”
Powell and Bush arrived in the region on the eve of a summit on relief and reconstruction for the tsunami-hit areas. Powell and top officials from 20 other countries, including at least a dozen heads of state, are to focus today on how to spend an unprecedented $3 billion in aid.
New pledges by Australia and Germany pushed them to the top of the list of donors. Australia raised its total to $810 million and Germany to $674 million. Previously, Japan’s $500 million pledge topped the donor list, followed by the United States with $350 million.
Elsewhere, other countries took time Wednesday to assess the tsunami’s affects on their citizens.
Europe came to a virtual standstill Wednesday as people paused for three minutes at noon to remember the dead. Subways, trains and buses stopped in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Rome and Stockholm. Schools across the continent fell silent, and in Spain television programs were replaced with black and white photographs of the disaster.
With the death toll among vacationing Swedes likely to top 1,000, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said the disaster was “something we will never forget has happened. We have lost so many, a father, a mother, grandfather, our child, little sister, friend.”
The official death toll for Indonesia stands at just over 94,000. But relief workers have yet to visit much of the coast south of Banda Aceh. Before the Dec. 26 disaster, about 700,000 people lived along the coastal road stretching south 200 miles from Banda Aceh.
Volunteers interviewed Wednesday said it was clear residents had died there in overwhelming numbers.
In the town of Leupeng, for example, only 400 of 7,800 residents survived, according to Freddy Sutrisno, the head of the Global Rescue Network, a Jakarta-based relief agency whose workers were the first to reach the devastated town earlier this week.
Those who remain in the town are desperate to get out, but many are suffering from compound fractures and other severe injuries and are too weak to walk for help. They are living on coconuts and the occasional chicken, slain with a machete, the volunteers said.
At Lhoknga, just south of Banda Aceh, refugees arriving Wednesday said they’d walked for days before reaching the first medical facility they’d seen – a beachside tent that Global Rescue had set up to dispense food, water and medicine.
The U.S. military is using helicopters to evacuate the injured and sick from remote areas of Indonesia to facilities where they can receive medical treatment. But even with 90 helicopters, many victims remain out of reach.
Lt. Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Navy has a 40-member medical disaster relief team on the ground in Indonesia “helping to assess what’s needed and where.”
Another team of about 25 disease and preventive medicine specialists have been on the ground within “the last couple of days” to help assess efforts to stem outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and malaria.
Hicks said he didn’t know if they had set up any aid stations in remote areas yet.
International aid agencies said they believe the situation is improving.
A United Nations report said a backlog of supplies is starting to clear up, and the Banda Aceh airport, shut down Tuesday after a jet carrying relief supplies struck a cow or a water buffalo on the runway, has reopened.
“Things have improved,” said Karen Dukess, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. “There were bottlenecks at regional airports. Now, we’re getting supplies to people who need them.”
But Dukess said major areas of Aceh remain accessible only by military helicopter, and the U.N. said there’s still a dire need for easily consumable instant food, medicines, electric generators, radios, masks and body bags.
Thursday’s summit at the Jakarta Convention Center is also expected to address proposals for an early warning system for the region to try to protect people from similar future disasters. Participants are to include U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan; the presidents of Indonesia and the Philippines; the prime ministers of New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam; and the foreign ministers from the hard-hit nations of Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.