International

Aid agencies warn of epidemic outbreak

By John Aglionby, Jonathan Steele, Patrick Barkham and Brian Whitaker

PHUKET/PANADURA/LONDON, DEC. 28. The scale of the disaster unleashed by an enormous undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean became apparent when the death toll from the tsunami climbed to more than 23,700 and aid agencies warned that disease could now hit stricken communities across Southeast Asia.

As putrefied bodies were piled on beaches in Sri Lanka and rescue teams reported a stench from human corpses mixed with dead animals in the Indonesian province of Aceh, aid workers warned that deadly typhoid, diarrhoea and hepatitis epidemics could break out within days because of polluted drinking water.

Unprecedented challenge

With food, drink, sanitation, shelter and healthcare urgently needed in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, a huge international rescue effort was under way on Monday night. Countries including Britain, the United States and Kuwait pledged millions of dollars in aid, but a senior United Nations official warned that the international effort faced an unprecedented challenge in dealing with a disaster that touched so many countries.

Relief organisations were struggling to determine exactly what help was needed, and where, with communications cut or overloaded. "We are used to dealing with disasters in one country. But I think something like this spread across many countries and islands is unprecedented," said Yvette Stevens of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the U.N. body that coordinates emergency relief.

Few countries in the region emerged unscathed from the death and destruction caused by the earthquake, whose epicentre was off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It sent tsunamis across the Indian Ocean without warning on Boxing Day, travelling 5,000 km and destroying impoverished coastal villages as far away as Somalia, where officials said hundreds were dead. Hospitals were overwhelmed in the Thai resort of Phuket, where bodies bloated from the floodwater were too large to fit into coffins.

Mortuaries full

With a nationwide toll of more than 12,000, mortuaries in Sri Lanka were full. In the town of Panadura, bodies spilled out into the sun from the hospital's eight refrigerated chambers.

Across Southeast Asia, hundreds more people were missing, including at least 200 police and family members believed buried under their barracks in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh, a spokesman said.

Andrew Sundersing, relief director for World Vision in Sri Lanka, said, "The first concern is waterborne diseases. Then there are thousands of people who don't have homes and need to build them. In the long term we need to ensure people have permanent structures to live in."

Oxfam is sending flood experts to Sri Lanka. "There are a lot of dead bodies lying around and as they start decomposing, the water can easily be contaminated," a spokeswoman said.

Warning system

Don McKinnon, the Secretary General of the Commonwealth, called for talks on creating a global early warning system to issue alerts about tsunamis. There was little awareness of the potential danger from tsunamis in the region: the last big one in the Indian Ocean was in 1833.

"At least two-thirds of the people who died should not have died," a natural disaster expert, Bill McGuire of University College London, told The Guardian. "They could have had an hour or so to get a kilometre or two inland or to reach high ground."

In Thailand, there was criticism of the Government's failure to provide adequate warning. "The [Meteorological Department] had up to an hour to announce the emergency message and evacuate people but they failed to do so," Thammasarote Smith, a former senior forecaster at the Department, told the Bangkok Post. "It is true that an earthquake is unpredictable but a tsunami, which occurs after an earthquake, is predictable." —

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