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What would be especially helpful are first-hand accounts from the affected areas.
What would be especially helpful are first-hand accounts from the affected areas.
Anonymous at 12/30/2004 08:48:00 PM |
Three flights carrying relief material leave for Port Blair:
[India News]: Chennai, Dec 31 : Three flights with CISF jawans, defence personnel, doctors and relief materials left here this morning for Port Blair, airport sources said.
Two Alliance Air and the other flight belonging to Indian Airlines, carrying some passengers also, left between 4.30 a.M. And 7.00 a.M, the sources said.
Central Industrial Security Force jawans numbering 40, defence personnel numbering 26 and a dozen doctors were there in the flights, the sources said.
ESIC medical teams to go to Tsunami-affected areas
The Employees' State Insurance Corporation will send medical teams including specialists to Tsunami-hit areas of south India and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Each of the medical teams will include specialist doctors in medicine, surgery, orthopaedics and paediatrics, ESIC said in a statement here.
Para-medical staff such as nurses, pharmacists, radiographers and laboratory technicians will also be deployed.
A medical team of about 12 doctors and para-medical staff alongwith medicines and medical equipment is being airlifted to Port Blair for its furthur deployment in badly-hit Car Nicobar Islands, the statement said.
Monks of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha (BSS) are also contributing to the relief operations and distributing food, medicines and other items in Port Blair and other parts of Andaman and Nicobar Islands like Havelock, Neil and Rangad.
BSS had also pledged to construct 500 houses for Tsunami-affected families in Tamil Nadu, a BSS release said here.
Meanwhile, employees of Indiaa Gandhi Open University (IGNOU) contributed one day's salary for the victims
Sumatra: no food, no drinking water, no medicine
The suffering in this once-bustling seaside town of 40,000 on Sumatra's west coast is unimaginable.
Five days after the massive earthquake struck beneath the seabed only 60 kilometres south-west of here, most survivors have received no food, drinking water, medicines or outside help.
"Please, help me. Please," begged Yuda Suria, 37, a father of two. "We have had no rice or water for two days," he said. "How can we live?"
Meulaboh is a wasteland.
Up to half the population may be dead. The waves that swept through here on Sunday were eight metres high.
The first earthquake collapsed most buildings. Aftershocks have hit every day since.
Everywhere you see suffering in Meulaboh.
Sisters Sintra, 15, and Nia, 12, and their brother Ferty, 9, sit in shock on a concrete block, all that is left of their home.
Their mother, grandmother and other family members are dead.
Asked what their future holds, they can't answer.
Nearby, soldiers are pulling bodies out of the debris. A small rotting foot protrudes from under pieces of iron.
The stench of death is everywhere. In 30-degree heat, bodies are falling apart.
Some people in the town are so hungry that they have been eating leaves from trees, soldiers said.
Juffizal, 32, said nobody in town has enough to drink because the tsunami contaminated the town's fresh water wells.
"We are thirsty . . . the bottled water has run out," he said.
"I am eating noodles once a day but soon they will run out also."
The Age arrived in Meulaboh yesterday on the first plane to land on the town's badly damaged airstrip. We brought boxes of food.
An Indonesian navy ship carrying food, medicine and supplies also anchored offshore yesterday. But this is only a fraction of what is desperately needed.
"Where is the United Nations?" asked a soldier driving a truck collecting bodies. "Tell the United Nations to come. We need their help."
The Age was among the first small group of journalists to reach the flattened centre of Meulaboh. We were swamped by people begging for help.
"Hungry, hungry," people screamed.
Looking at the piles of debris - some of it two storeys high - it is difficult to believe that Meulaboh can rebuild.
But life has always been tough for the Achinese who were the last to hold off Dutch colonisation in the early 1900s. Some of them have fought Jakarta's rule for decades.
Here men are picking twisted motorcycles from the debris, here a mother hangs out her washing a few metres from a bloated corpse, here a girl stacks pieces of timber. And here a young mother sits under a tree breastfeeding her baby.
For some, the trauma is too great; they stumble along, rambling incoherently.
"I'm a government official. I've lost everything . . . where are my wages, help me," a distressed man keeps saying.
Army captain Danding Rachmat Firdaus said most people from nearby villages were sleeping in forests kilometres away from the coast.
"The tremors continue, not like Sunday, they are only slight, but they are still very scary for the people," he said.
Meulaboh and other towns along Sumatra's west coast had been cut off until yesterday.
Indonesian company ASI Pudjiastuti started shuttling emergency relief with flights by two Cessnas yesterday after German pilot Christian von Stromberg made a daring landing on the debris-strewn Meulaboh runway. He managed to skirt uprooted coconut palms and cracked bitumen. Late yesterday, soldiers helped clear the runway of debris.
The military has struggled to co-ordinate the distribution of aid that has been pouring into Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, since Monday.
Misery visits 'Stone Age' islands
At daybreak, a stream of refugees emerged from a narrow jungle path on to the runway of the wrecked air base on Car Nicobar, a remote Indian outpost in the Bay of Bengal.
Through the morning, more and more desperate people struggled in, some with broken limbs, some carrying elderly men and women in hammocks.
"Take me away, take me away from my village," mumbled Dyna Issac, 80, a withered woman suspended in a cloth cradle that her daughters-in-law carried over their shoulders.
The elderly woman, a member of an indigenous tribe, said she lost her sons to the tsunami that lashed India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, an archipelago of 500 bumps in the ocean.
"Our village, Sawai, has been completely swallowed by the sea," said daughter-in-law Clara Issac, as they approached Indian officials to beg for help.
Car Nicobar is the gateway to more remote parts of a group of islands that spread out along hundreds of square kilometres. The islands stood directly in the way of the waves that were triggered by the earthquake more than 700 kilometres to the south-east.
The sea swept more than 1.5 kilometres inland in some places, stripping away undergrowth and felling trees. Villagers were carried off by the waves and timber houses and cement buildings along the shore were smashed.
Because the islands are so remote, the extent of the devastation is only now becoming known. Officials say at least 3000 people have died. Some unconfirmed estimates put the toll as high as 10,000 out of 350,000 inhabitants.
Located about 1400 kilometres east of the Indian mainland, the islands have been home to indigenous tribes for thousands of years.
The Indian air force also uses the Car Nicobar base as a listening post to monitor China and track vessels on cargo and oil shipment routes. The base's headquarters and housing were flattened by the waves and 102 military personnel were killed.
The islanders who stumbled out of the jungle on Wednesday are camping out in the buildings that remain. So far, 2500 have been flown from the base to the islands' main commercial centre and administrative capital, Port Blair. But water supplies have been cut there, forcing people to rely on water supplied in buckets.
The islands' ferry system has been disrupted, and the military command is struggling to distribute food, water and medicine.
The islands have been hit daily by aftershocks.
So far, search teams have been unable to reach the areas that are farthest away.
Beyond the seashore and the tourist sites, the islands are home to the tribes. Several are traditional hunter-gatherer communities, using bows and arrows to kill wild pigs and harpoons to spear turtles.
The five tribes, which total only 800 people, exist in designated reserves set up to protect traditions that have persisted since the Stone Age.
The islands' Lieutenant-Governor, Ram Kapse, who completed a three-day boat tour of the worst-affected areas, said almost all the tribes had been contacted.
Many, like the Great Andamanese, who live on Great Andaman Island and number only 49, took refuge in the dense rainforest that covers much of the archipelago, he said.
Australian Wayne Harrigan, 46, who was staying on Little Andaman, said the Onge, of whom only 98 survive, had also found refuge.
"Several people from our camp went to check on them, and they had clearly survived, even though Dugan Creek, where most of them live, was devastated," he said. "They must have taken shelter inland."
Of the other tribes, the Shompen, thought to number 13, have yet to be contacted.
They live in hilly areas but one official at the air base said: "We don't know whether the Shompens are dead or alive . . . All our efforts to trace them have failed."
The Jarawa, a hunter-gatherer tribe nearly wiped out by an outbreak of measles in 1999, have reported in through intermediaries.
A ship was on its way to the most hostile of the tribes, the 300-strong Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island and are known for firing arrows at anyone trying to approach them.
- Washington Post, with Telegraph
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Does anyone have any idea on what happened to the Air Force Station people in Carnicobar? Have they been satisfactorily compensated? Where are the survivors? How is their condition? Any idea?
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