Annan views scenes of ‘utter destruction’
US Secretary of State Colin Powell also expressed shock at the scale of the disaster as he made a separate tour of another devastated Indian Ocean country - Sri Lanka - on one of his last foreign trips before he steps down in a fortnight.
As aid workers turned their attention to hundreds of thousands of people thought to be stranded in isolated parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, Jakarta added more than 7,000 deaths to its tsunami toll. It now stands at 101,318, out of a total of more than 153,000 for the 13 nations affected.
“I have never seen such utter destruction, mile after mile. You wonder, where are the people,” Mr Annan said after taking a helicopter tour with World Bank chief James Wolfensohn.
A day after a crisis aid summit in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, Mr Powell toured Sri Lanka’s south, where the giant waves that crashed ashore on December 26 killed more than 30,000 and reduced coastal towns to piles of rubble.
“The destruction that we saw was significant,” he said as he wrapped up his lightning visit. “It was more than just walls that have been knocked down or buildings that have been crushed, but lives that were crushed and snuffed out.”
The UN warned that the fate of tens of thousands was unknown and the toll could climb sharply if survivors scrabbling for food and clean water succumbed to dysentery and cholera.
Up to a million people may have lived in Aceh’s isolated coastal areas before they were struck by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and its killer waves, UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said.
More than €4.6 billion has been pledged by governments, individuals and corporations in an unprecedented global response to the widest-ranging natural calamity in living memory.
Mr Annan’s helicopter took him over the town of Meulaboh on Sumatra’s west coast, just 90 miles from the epicentre of the undersea earthquake that unleashed the tsunami.
The UN estimates one-third of Meulaboh’s 120,000 people died when the giant waves ripped through.
“We have no information at all below Meulaboh. It is a big worry,” said Michael Elmquist, UN relief chief in Banda Aceh, of the region where satellite photographs showed an “area that used to be land is now sea”.
Hundreds of aid groups from around the world are setting up shop in Banda Aceh in a chaotic relief effort, and are providing much of the visible economic activity there.
The UN said it believed it was meeting the immediate needs of the people of Banda Aceh, once a thriving city of more than 300,000 people but now largely flattened and strewn with debris and rotting corpses.
Thousands attended Friday prayers and the city’s main mosque was filled with tsunami survivors.
In Thailand, where more than 8,000 foreign tourists have been confirmed dead, missing or unaccounted for, forensic teams are working feverishly to identify bodies through DNA testing.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said up to 440 Britons - more than double previous estimates - may have died.
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