Struggle to deliver vital aid

AID workers yesterday struggled to help thousands huddled in make-shift camps in Indonesia’s northern Sumatra, where two-thirds of the 145,000 killed across the region died, and to reach remote areas after roads and airstrips were washed away.

Three US presidents appealed to the American public to give money to ward off hunger and disease in the 13 countries hit by the killer waves nine days ago.

US helicopters began shuttling injured refugees, many of them children, out of some of the worst-hit parts of Aceh province, where many towns and villages were wiped out.

“All the villagers started coming out of the woodwork, telling us they needed help. They said there were a lot more wounded people further inland up in the mountains,” helicopter pilot Lieutenant-Commander Joel Moss said from the carrier Abraham Lincoln.

Pilots described columns of refugees trudging up the coast toward the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. Some charged the helicopters to fight each other for the food.

Amid the struggle to survive, few forgot their appalling grief and losses.

“I thought that my two sons were my future,” said Shiva Shankari, 22, at a refugee camp on India’s eastern coast.

While her daughter survived, her sons, aged three and five, that she and her sister tried to save, both died. “What can I do? I am lost,” she said.

“My husband said, ‘Why are you alive and my sons are dead?’”

Some transport bottlenecks have been eased, improving capacity to get in goods on a daily basis to serve the estimated five million requiring some form of aid.

Many airports are bursting with emergency supplies. But a logistical nightmare looms in distributing them through vast regions where roads and bridges have been washed away, and uncontaminated water is scarce.

“The emergency teams are arriving to be blocked by a wall of devastation. Everything is destroyed,” said a CARE worker.

In Aceh and southern Thailand, workers used elephants to shift debris and hunt for survivors.