BANDA ACEH, Indonesia: Planes loaded with everything from lentils to water purifiers touched down across Asia yesterday, the start of the largest relief effort in history, as aid workers predicted the death toll from this week’s earthquake and tsunamis would top 100,000. Military teams reaching the west coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra island for the first time reported scenes of total devastation.
“We’re facing a disaster of unprecedented proportion in nature,” said Simon Missiri, Asia Pacific chief at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “We’re talking about a staggering death toll.”
Yesterday, the toll soared to about 77,000.
The survey of Sumatra – nearest the epicentre of Sunday’s massive quake which launched a wall of water around Asia – highlighted the scale of the challenge relief organisations will face in the weeks and months to come.
On the first visit to the battered region, news crews flew over town after town covered in mud and sea water. Homes had their roofs ripped off or were flattened. There were few signs of life, except for a handful of villagers scavenging for food on the beach.
“The damage is truly devastating,” said Maj. Gen. Endang Suwarya, the military commander of Sumatra’s Aceh province, who toured the west coast by helicopter. “Seventy-five percent of the west coast is destroyed and some places it’s 100 percent. These people are isolated and we will try and get them help.”
With tens of thousands of people still missing, Peter Ress, operations support chief for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said figures of the dead and missing would be “absolutely enormous”.
“I would not be surprised that we are over 100,000 dead when we start seeing what’s happened in, particularly, (India’s) Nicobar and the Andaman Islands,” he said.
More than 500,000 are reported injured. The federation has so far been unable to assess the total number of missing people.
“We have little hope, except for individual miracles,” Jean-Marc Espalioux, chairman of the Accor hotel group, said of the search for thousands of tourists and locals missing from beach resorts of southern Thailand – including 2,000 Scandinavians.
Indonesia’s official death toll stood at 45,268 but authorities said this did not include a full count from Sumatra’s west coast, where more than 10,000 deaths were suspected.
Trucks dumped more than 1,000 unidentified bloated bodies into open graves on Sumatra and the navy sent a flotilla of ships to remote parts of the island.
With the threat of disease on the rise and few ways to identify the dead, there was no choice but to get the bodies under ground, said military Col. Achmad Yani Basuki.
Meanwhile, in a rare positive note, wildlife enthusiasts in Sri Lanka were surprised to see no evidence of large-scale deaths of animals – indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.
“Maybe what we think is true, that animals have a sixth sense,” said Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, whose Jetwing Eco Holidays runs a hotel in the Yala National Park.
In another instance, a London-based woman told Britain’s Press Association that a group of youngsters at a Phuket beach were saved when an elephant trainer placed them on the animal’s back and led them to safety before the giant wave crashed ashore.
However there were few reports of miraculous escapes in India, where the death toll rose to nearly 7,000. Not included in the toll are some 8,000 who are missing and feared dead on India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, east of the mainland.
Sri Lanka put its toll at nearly 22,500. Thailand said it had more than 1,800 dead and a total of more than 300 were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya.
Aid groups struggled to head off the threat of cholera and malaria epidemics that could break out where water supplies are polluted with bodies and debris.
In Sri Lanka, four planes arrived in the capital bringing a surgical hospital from Finland, a water purification plant from Germany, doctors and medicine from Japan as well as aid workers from Britain, the Red Cross said.
Supplies that included 175 tons of rice and 100 doctors reached Sumatra’s Banda Aceh. Yet with aid not arriving quickly enough, desperate people in towns across Sumatra stole whatever food they could find, officials said.
Widespread looting also was reported in Thailand’s devastated resort islands of Phuket and Phi Phi, where European and Australian tourists left valuables behind in wrecked hotels when they fled – or were swept away.
An international airlift was under way to ferry critical aid and medicine to Phuket as well as to take home shellshocked travellers. Jets from France and Australia were among the first to touch down at the island’s airport. Greece, Italy, Germany and Sweden planned similar flights.
Along India’s southern coast, paramedics began vaccinating 65,000 tsunami survivors in Tamil Nadu state against cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and dysentery, said Gagandeep Singh Bedi, a top government administrator.
“We have accelerated disposing of bodies to minimise the risk of an epidemic. Also, we have started spraying bleaching powder on the beaches from where the bodies have been recovered,” said Veera Shanmuga Moni, a top administrator of Tamil Nadu’s Nagappattinam district.
The world’s biggest re-insurer, Germany’s Munich Re, estimated the damage to buildings and foundations in the affected regions would be at least e10 billion.
Donations for recovery efforts came in from all parts of the globe.
The world’s richest nations have pledged more than $250 million in emergency aid.
The United Nations said it would launch an international appeal on 6 January for money to cover the emergency phase of the operation but, UN officials said, billions of dollars are needed to rebuild the shattered countries. (AP)