North Korea struggles to treat train victims

The main hospital treating victims of a train explosion in North Korea laid out young patients on filing cabinets today as it struggled to overcome a shortage of beds and problems with medical equipment, according to an aid official.

At the Sinuiju Provincial Hospital, just across the Chinese border into North Korea, 360 patients from the blast were undergoing treatment, according to Tony Banbury, Asia regional director for the UN World Food Programme. He said more than 60% of the victims were children.

“They clearly lack the ability to care for all the patients,” Banbury said.

The enormous explosion on Thursday in the town of Ryongchun, fed by oil and chemicals, killed 161 people and injured at least 1,300, officials said.

The death toll rose by seven today, but it was unclear whether the higher number reflected new fatalities or simply confirmed casualties. Aid agencies have not said whether they expect the number to increase further.

As relief workers assessed damage, 11 trucks crammed with tents, blankets and instant noodles rumbled across the Chinese frontier into North Korea today - part of a 1 million yuan (€127,600) multi-national shipment to the devastated borderland region. South Korea, Japan and Australia have also offered aid.

The trucks were driven by Chinese People’s Armed Police officers and bore red-and-white banners saying “donations from the government of the People’s Republic of China”.

Lee Yoon-goo, the Red Cross chief in Seoul, proposed co-ordinating relief efforts with North Korea’s Red Cross in a telephone message via Red Cross liaison officers at the truce village of Panmunjom, in the buffer zone where the Koreas have faced-off since their war in the early 1950s.

In Canberra, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said today his country would help if Pyongyang asked. “But at this stage, they do seem to be coping, albeit not very well, with this disaster,” Downer told Australian television’s Ten Network.

In the Sinuiju hospital, Banbury said the most serious injuries were suffered by children in a nearby school who heard the initial blast, glanced toward it and were smacked by a wave of glass, rubble and heat. Many were left with serious eye injuries, he said.

The hospital was “short of just about everything”, Banbury said – including antibiotics, steroids and painkillers. Equipment was not plugged in, suggesting it was broken or electricity was insufficient, and the number of beds was so meagre that some children were being laid on filing cabinets.

Puertoe Vulthi, a UNICEF representative in Pyongyang, said the devastation at the school could have been far more lethal. She said the blast happened just after noon, 10 minutes after the morning session ended, and many children had already left.

“It could have been much worse,” Vulthi said.

Nearly half of the dead were children in the school, which was torn apart by the blast. The disaster also left thousands of Ryongchon residents homeless.

“They’ve been taken in by other families,” Beijing-based Red Cross spokesman John Sparrow said. “We were fearing people on the streets. We breathed a big sigh of relief when we saw that wasn’t the case.”

Aid workers recounted huge craters, twisted rail tracks and scorched buildings. But all of the 1,300 people that North Korean officials said were injured had been evacuated before the aid workers arrived to nearby Sinuiju, where the foreigners were not immediately able to visit.

“People were cleaning up by hand and loading their meagre belongings onto ox carts,” Banbury said after the visit today. “They looked like World War I refugees.”

UN officials estimated 40% of Ryongchun was damaged.

The aid workers’ visit followed a rare invitation from the North’s communist government, which relaxed its normally intense secrecy as it pleaded for international help.

North Korea’s reclusive communist regime has blamed the disaster on human error, saying a train cargo of oil and chemicals ignited when workers knocked the wagons against power lines.

The statement was unusually frank for a government that controls information tightly, both to the world and its own people.

North Korea’s state news agency said the explosion was set-off by “electrical contact caused by carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser”. Ammonium nitrate can be extremely volatile.