Thursday, December 30, 2004
December 30, 2004DISASTER
Frayed Nerves and Aftershocks Create Panic in Southern AsiaBy AMY WALDMAN
NAGAPPATTINAM, India, Dec. 30 — Frayed nerves and a slight aftershock created widespread panic throughout southern Asia today, as the Indian government issued a warning of another tsunami along India’s southern coast. In India and Sri Lanka, many fled the beaches in fear of more deadly waves, muddling the relief effort and bringing the recovery of bodies in many areas to a temporary halt.
Three aftershocks that measured just above 5 on the Richter scale ultimately led to officials in India to issue what amounted to a false alarm. The government’s overreaction reflected the sensitivity of Indian officials to criticism that they should have given notice of the tsunami to coastal villages, which in many cases were hit two or three hours after the earthquake on Sunday that devastated much of southern Asia.
The warning came a day after world leaders, including President Bush, promised long-range help to Asian countries as impatience with the pace of relief efforts rose along with the estimated toll from the week’s disaster, which officials said today had surpassed 115,000 dead.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy called today for an emergency meeting of the Group of Eight to discuss options for aid and debt reduction in the wake of what he called “the worst cataclysm of the modern era,” according to the Reuters news agency.
As American planes and ships moved into place to help on Wednesday, Mr. Bush made his first public comments since tsunamis inundated about a dozen countries on Sunday, reflecting pressure on the vacationing president to appear more engaged in what aid groups are calling one of the worst natural disasters in history.
“These past few days have brought loss and grief to the world that is beyond our comprehension,” he said at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., adding that Washington was prepared to contribute much more than the $35 million it initially pledged.
“We are committed to helping the affected countries in the difficult weeks and months that lie ahead,” Mr. Bush said. He said the United States would work closely with Japan, India and Australia to coordinate relief efforts.
In Washington, two influential Republican lawmakers said today they would introduce legislation in the new Congress for a sizable aid package.
“I think there will be very decisive action early on,” said Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Lugar, speaking on CNN, said he had drawn up a resolution anticipating “very generous appropriations.”
Mr. Lugar’s House counterpart, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, said he too is drafting legislation for action early in the new year. “The challenges of coping with suffering on this magnitude are almost unfathomable, and we will act,” Mr. Hyde said in a statement issued by the House Committee on International Relations, which he heads.
Mr. Hyde said a Congressional delegation led by Representative Jim Leach, Republican of Iowa, would visit Thailand and Sri Lanka next week, and that the group’s findings would be important in shaping the aid legislation. Mr. Leach is chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited the embassies of Thailand and Sri Lanka to offer condolences on behalf of President Bush and the American people and to promise that “we will stand with them in solidarity and do everything we can to assist in this time of tragedy,” as he put it outside the Sri Lankan Embassy.
Meanwhile, Secretary General Kofi Annan cut short his vacation to return to New York to oversee the United Nations’ relief effort, one of the largest in the organization’s history.
Today, Mr. Annan told reporters that world governments had donated $500 million thus far to help disaster victims.
The tsunamis have killed more than 115,00 people in 11 countries throughout southern Asia and Africa, according to The Associated Press. The nation hit the hardest appears to be Indonesia, where roughly 80,000 79,940 were reported killed on Sumatra. There, the greatest devastation appears to have occurred in the province of Aceh, where, Agence France-Presse said, about 45,000 roughly 80,000 deaths have been reported.
In Sri Lanka, nearly 25,000 were reported killed, and in India, the death toll has reached 7,330, according to The A.P.
The tsunami warning today by the Indian government created panic and confusion throughout India, halting the passage of relief trucks into the Nagappattinam district, where 4,332 people have been confirmed dead, and the continuing effort to recover bodies was halted.
Near the village of Akkarapatti, boats thrown up by the sea during the tsunami had blocked the roads and delayed the recovery of bodies. The warning caused officials to abandon plans to use giant rollers to clear the way.
“Everybody gets into a panic situation,” said Shantha Sheela Nair, an official coordinating relief work in the district. “If we get a warning of tsunami again, we are hampered at every step.” The warning, from the Ministry of Home Affairs, was sent out by loudspeaker in coastal villages, where the search for bodies is still under way.
In Gharamganbadi, gloved men searching for the remains of their wives and children in the rubble of their homes just steps from the sea began arguing over whether to abandon their work and move away from the water whose swell suddenly seemed to take on an ominous cast when the warning arrived.
Reluctantly, they left.
In another town, Velankanni, the site of a religious shrine where about 1,300 bodies have been recovered so far, the announcement at 11 a.m. by the police this morning that people should move at least three kilometers inland sent hundreds running through the ravaged lanes of the town.
The stench of rotting bodies continued to rise from the beaches of the most affected villages. Government agencies have moved enough machines and manpower to dig out bodies that remain stranded in the sand and debris, but the work stalled here in Nagappattinam today in the wake of the tsunami warnings.
The tsunami alert was issued following reports that several aftershocks had pushed up the water level, an official at the emergency control room of India’s Home Ministry said, according to news agencies. A 5.7 magnitude underwater quake was recorded at 5:18 a.m. local time northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia, near the epicenter of the original earthquake. That quake registered 9.0, meaning it was 30,000 times more energetic than the aftershock. Other quakes were felt in Thailand and Myanmar.
“We have issued an alert; there could be a wave attack in the next one hour,” said Veera Shanmuga Mani, the top administrator in Nagappattinam.
As police sirens blared on beaches here in Tamil Nadu, where most of India’s tsunami deaths occurred, thousands streamed inland on foot or crammed any vehicle they could find, looking for higher ground. Some shouted: “Waves are coming! Waves are coming!” The police ordered hundreds of vehicles carrying relief supplies not to enter Nagappattinam. Similar warnings were issued for Kerala, a southern state, and for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Later, as it became clear the government had overreacted to the aftershocks, officials appealed for calm.
“There is no reason to panic,” an official in the back of a jeep said through a megaphone in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “You can go back to your jobs or your home, wherever you please. There is no imminent danger.”
In Sri Lanka, the military told residents of coastal areas not to panic, but the government advised them to move to higher ground as a precaution. The advice and the Indian alert, heard on radio in coastal Sri Lanka, prompted thousands of Sri Lankans to panic and flee inland, Reuters reported. At a lagoon near Arugam Bay on the island’s eastern coast, local residents jumped off a naval ship ferrying aid and waded to the beaches.
In Thailand, tsunami sirens in the south sent people dashing from beaches, but only small waves followed.
By Wednesday, three days after the calamity struck, survivors in Aceh and elsewhere were growing increasingly desperate for help to arrive.
“There is no food here whatsoever,” Reuters quoted Vaiti Usman, a woman in Aceh, as saying. “We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine. I haven’t eaten in two days.”
Jan Egeland, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, said Wednesday that international assistance was now coming forward in such quantity that the challenge was shifting from attracting aid to coordinating it. “Coordination is now vital,” he said.
“This is one of the biggest relief operations we have ever had,” he said, “and we see clearly that in addition to our traditional donors, we now have a very generous outpouring from new donors, Asian societies, gulf Arab countries.”
Mr. Egeland said pledges and donations of immediate assistance had passed $220 million, with fresh amounts arriving almost hourly. In addition, he said, there has been “in kind” aid and military assistance worth tens of millions of dollars.
The Pentagon has set up a joint task force out of Okinawa, deploying forces to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Among the equipment sent are six C-130 transport planes, nine P-3 air surveillance and rescue planes, an aircraft carrier and several ships with the ability to produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water each day.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the aid money needed would end up “in the billions” of dollars, and pledged that the United States would increase its contributions and work with other donors to reach that goal.
To coordinate the international effort, Mr. Egeland at the United Nations said he was sending his deputy, Margareta Wallström, on Wednesday night to Geneva, where she would accompany United Nations officials to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other affected countries.
“In any disaster of this nature,” Ms. Wallström said, “you have to start planning the recovery now, parallel with the very large emergency response.”
She said that it was essential to repair airports, schools, clinics and roads and that the United Nations had a great deal of logistics expertise at its disposal. “Countries like India and Thailand will fairly quickly come to grips with these problems,” she said. “It will take longer in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.”
The remoteness of many of the areas struck was complicating the relief effort and adding to the uncertainty about the death toll, along with the large numbers of missing and the speed with which graves are being dug and filled.
In Indonesia, tens of thousands of people not counted in the tally of the devastation were feared dead in Meulaboh, on Aceh’s west coast, which has been accessible only by air and where the first rescue crews arrived on Wednesday. “Eighty percent of the buildings are wrecked,” Chief Security Minister Widodo Adi Sutjipto told Reuters.
Sri Lanka has a population of only 20 million, which means the deaths and damage are having a magnified impact, and President Chandrika Kumaratunga appealed for unity in a country that has just emerged from two decades of civil war.
“I truly believe this is the time for us to shed all our differences and unite to meet the challenge of rebuilding our country,” she said Wednesday.
The Indian government, meanwhile, faced increasing pressure to explain why it failed to warn coastal communities of the approaching sea surge. Government officials said Wednesday that they would install 10 to 12 “deep-ocean assessment and reporting systems” and other technological defenses to warn of future tsunamis.
At a news conference, the minister of science and technology and ocean development, Kapil Sibal, said the government could not be blamed, however. “No government thought of it,” he said. “The last recorded tsunami has been in 1883. It was not in the horizon of our thoughts.”
He said the Indian authorities had learned of the earthquake near Sumatra at 6:29 a.m., but had no way of knowing that it would cause tsunamis that would hit the Indian coast some two and a half hours later.
For now, the emphasis was on helping the injured, bereaved and ill.
An American P-3 aircraft went into operation in Thailand, conducting reconnaissance missions to get a more accurate picture of the devastation, a United States Embassy spokesman said.
American C-130 aircraft from Japan also started arriving with relief supplies on Wednesday at the Thai military base of U Tapao, which will serve as the coordination center for the entire military relief effort in Asia.
A priority request from the Thai authorities was for body bags and forensics to support the collection and identification of the dead.
Mr. Egeland at the United Nations said that in some of the hardest-hit areas, so much unsolicited assistance was arriving that airports could not handle the traffic and planes had to go to distant airstrips where there was no transportation to get the materials to where they were needed.
“There are very few airstrips in these areas, and the strips and airspace are precious to us,” he said. Over all, though, he said this relief effort had been more disciplined than past ones.
The United Nations assumed that there were at least four injured people for every dead person, he said, and medical facilities were overwhelmed caring for them. “Many local medical facilities in many instances were destroyed in the first place, and those not destroyed are totally swamped,” he said.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Nagappattinam for this article, Warren Hoge contributed from the United Nations, Steven R. Weisman and David Stout contributed from Washington and Mark Glassman contributed from New York.
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Frayed Nerves and Aftershocks Create Panic in Southern AsiaBy AMY WALDMAN
NAGAPPATTINAM, India, Dec. 30 — Frayed nerves and a slight aftershock created widespread panic throughout southern Asia today, as the Indian government issued a warning of another tsunami along India’s southern coast. In India and Sri Lanka, many fled the beaches in fear of more deadly waves, muddling the relief effort and bringing the recovery of bodies in many areas to a temporary halt.
Three aftershocks that measured just above 5 on the Richter scale ultimately led to officials in India to issue what amounted to a false alarm. The government’s overreaction reflected the sensitivity of Indian officials to criticism that they should have given notice of the tsunami to coastal villages, which in many cases were hit two or three hours after the earthquake on Sunday that devastated much of southern Asia.
The warning came a day after world leaders, including President Bush, promised long-range help to Asian countries as impatience with the pace of relief efforts rose along with the estimated toll from the week’s disaster, which officials said today had surpassed 115,000 dead.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy called today for an emergency meeting of the Group of Eight to discuss options for aid and debt reduction in the wake of what he called “the worst cataclysm of the modern era,” according to the Reuters news agency.
As American planes and ships moved into place to help on Wednesday, Mr. Bush made his first public comments since tsunamis inundated about a dozen countries on Sunday, reflecting pressure on the vacationing president to appear more engaged in what aid groups are calling one of the worst natural disasters in history.
“These past few days have brought loss and grief to the world that is beyond our comprehension,” he said at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., adding that Washington was prepared to contribute much more than the $35 million it initially pledged.
“We are committed to helping the affected countries in the difficult weeks and months that lie ahead,” Mr. Bush said. He said the United States would work closely with Japan, India and Australia to coordinate relief efforts.
In Washington, two influential Republican lawmakers said today they would introduce legislation in the new Congress for a sizable aid package.
“I think there will be very decisive action early on,” said Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Lugar, speaking on CNN, said he had drawn up a resolution anticipating “very generous appropriations.”
Mr. Lugar’s House counterpart, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, said he too is drafting legislation for action early in the new year. “The challenges of coping with suffering on this magnitude are almost unfathomable, and we will act,” Mr. Hyde said in a statement issued by the House Committee on International Relations, which he heads.
Mr. Hyde said a Congressional delegation led by Representative Jim Leach, Republican of Iowa, would visit Thailand and Sri Lanka next week, and that the group’s findings would be important in shaping the aid legislation. Mr. Leach is chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited the embassies of Thailand and Sri Lanka to offer condolences on behalf of President Bush and the American people and to promise that “we will stand with them in solidarity and do everything we can to assist in this time of tragedy,” as he put it outside the Sri Lankan Embassy.
Meanwhile, Secretary General Kofi Annan cut short his vacation to return to New York to oversee the United Nations’ relief effort, one of the largest in the organization’s history.
Today, Mr. Annan told reporters that world governments had donated $500 million thus far to help disaster victims.
The tsunamis have killed more than 115,00 people in 11 countries throughout southern Asia and Africa, according to The Associated Press. The nation hit the hardest appears to be Indonesia, where roughly 80,000 79,940 were reported killed on Sumatra. There, the greatest devastation appears to have occurred in the province of Aceh, where, Agence France-Presse said, about 45,000 roughly 80,000 deaths have been reported.
In Sri Lanka, nearly 25,000 were reported killed, and in India, the death toll has reached 7,330, according to The A.P.
The tsunami warning today by the Indian government created panic and confusion throughout India, halting the passage of relief trucks into the Nagappattinam district, where 4,332 people have been confirmed dead, and the continuing effort to recover bodies was halted.
Near the village of Akkarapatti, boats thrown up by the sea during the tsunami had blocked the roads and delayed the recovery of bodies. The warning caused officials to abandon plans to use giant rollers to clear the way.
“Everybody gets into a panic situation,” said Shantha Sheela Nair, an official coordinating relief work in the district. “If we get a warning of tsunami again, we are hampered at every step.” The warning, from the Ministry of Home Affairs, was sent out by loudspeaker in coastal villages, where the search for bodies is still under way.
In Gharamganbadi, gloved men searching for the remains of their wives and children in the rubble of their homes just steps from the sea began arguing over whether to abandon their work and move away from the water whose swell suddenly seemed to take on an ominous cast when the warning arrived.
Reluctantly, they left.
In another town, Velankanni, the site of a religious shrine where about 1,300 bodies have been recovered so far, the announcement at 11 a.m. by the police this morning that people should move at least three kilometers inland sent hundreds running through the ravaged lanes of the town.
The stench of rotting bodies continued to rise from the beaches of the most affected villages. Government agencies have moved enough machines and manpower to dig out bodies that remain stranded in the sand and debris, but the work stalled here in Nagappattinam today in the wake of the tsunami warnings.
The tsunami alert was issued following reports that several aftershocks had pushed up the water level, an official at the emergency control room of India’s Home Ministry said, according to news agencies. A 5.7 magnitude underwater quake was recorded at 5:18 a.m. local time northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia, near the epicenter of the original earthquake. That quake registered 9.0, meaning it was 30,000 times more energetic than the aftershock. Other quakes were felt in Thailand and Myanmar.
“We have issued an alert; there could be a wave attack in the next one hour,” said Veera Shanmuga Mani, the top administrator in Nagappattinam.
As police sirens blared on beaches here in Tamil Nadu, where most of India’s tsunami deaths occurred, thousands streamed inland on foot or crammed any vehicle they could find, looking for higher ground. Some shouted: “Waves are coming! Waves are coming!” The police ordered hundreds of vehicles carrying relief supplies not to enter Nagappattinam. Similar warnings were issued for Kerala, a southern state, and for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Later, as it became clear the government had overreacted to the aftershocks, officials appealed for calm.
“There is no reason to panic,” an official in the back of a jeep said through a megaphone in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “You can go back to your jobs or your home, wherever you please. There is no imminent danger.”
In Sri Lanka, the military told residents of coastal areas not to panic, but the government advised them to move to higher ground as a precaution. The advice and the Indian alert, heard on radio in coastal Sri Lanka, prompted thousands of Sri Lankans to panic and flee inland, Reuters reported. At a lagoon near Arugam Bay on the island’s eastern coast, local residents jumped off a naval ship ferrying aid and waded to the beaches.
In Thailand, tsunami sirens in the south sent people dashing from beaches, but only small waves followed.
By Wednesday, three days after the calamity struck, survivors in Aceh and elsewhere were growing increasingly desperate for help to arrive.
“There is no food here whatsoever,” Reuters quoted Vaiti Usman, a woman in Aceh, as saying. “We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine. I haven’t eaten in two days.”
Jan Egeland, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, said Wednesday that international assistance was now coming forward in such quantity that the challenge was shifting from attracting aid to coordinating it. “Coordination is now vital,” he said.
“This is one of the biggest relief operations we have ever had,” he said, “and we see clearly that in addition to our traditional donors, we now have a very generous outpouring from new donors, Asian societies, gulf Arab countries.”
Mr. Egeland said pledges and donations of immediate assistance had passed $220 million, with fresh amounts arriving almost hourly. In addition, he said, there has been “in kind” aid and military assistance worth tens of millions of dollars.
The Pentagon has set up a joint task force out of Okinawa, deploying forces to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Among the equipment sent are six C-130 transport planes, nine P-3 air surveillance and rescue planes, an aircraft carrier and several ships with the ability to produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water each day.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the aid money needed would end up “in the billions” of dollars, and pledged that the United States would increase its contributions and work with other donors to reach that goal.
To coordinate the international effort, Mr. Egeland at the United Nations said he was sending his deputy, Margareta Wallström, on Wednesday night to Geneva, where she would accompany United Nations officials to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other affected countries.
“In any disaster of this nature,” Ms. Wallström said, “you have to start planning the recovery now, parallel with the very large emergency response.”
She said that it was essential to repair airports, schools, clinics and roads and that the United Nations had a great deal of logistics expertise at its disposal. “Countries like India and Thailand will fairly quickly come to grips with these problems,” she said. “It will take longer in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.”
The remoteness of many of the areas struck was complicating the relief effort and adding to the uncertainty about the death toll, along with the large numbers of missing and the speed with which graves are being dug and filled.
In Indonesia, tens of thousands of people not counted in the tally of the devastation were feared dead in Meulaboh, on Aceh’s west coast, which has been accessible only by air and where the first rescue crews arrived on Wednesday. “Eighty percent of the buildings are wrecked,” Chief Security Minister Widodo Adi Sutjipto told Reuters.
Sri Lanka has a population of only 20 million, which means the deaths and damage are having a magnified impact, and President Chandrika Kumaratunga appealed for unity in a country that has just emerged from two decades of civil war.
“I truly believe this is the time for us to shed all our differences and unite to meet the challenge of rebuilding our country,” she said Wednesday.
The Indian government, meanwhile, faced increasing pressure to explain why it failed to warn coastal communities of the approaching sea surge. Government officials said Wednesday that they would install 10 to 12 “deep-ocean assessment and reporting systems” and other technological defenses to warn of future tsunamis.
At a news conference, the minister of science and technology and ocean development, Kapil Sibal, said the government could not be blamed, however. “No government thought of it,” he said. “The last recorded tsunami has been in 1883. It was not in the horizon of our thoughts.”
He said the Indian authorities had learned of the earthquake near Sumatra at 6:29 a.m., but had no way of knowing that it would cause tsunamis that would hit the Indian coast some two and a half hours later.
For now, the emphasis was on helping the injured, bereaved and ill.
An American P-3 aircraft went into operation in Thailand, conducting reconnaissance missions to get a more accurate picture of the devastation, a United States Embassy spokesman said.
American C-130 aircraft from Japan also started arriving with relief supplies on Wednesday at the Thai military base of U Tapao, which will serve as the coordination center for the entire military relief effort in Asia.
A priority request from the Thai authorities was for body bags and forensics to support the collection and identification of the dead.
Mr. Egeland at the United Nations said that in some of the hardest-hit areas, so much unsolicited assistance was arriving that airports could not handle the traffic and planes had to go to distant airstrips where there was no transportation to get the materials to where they were needed.
“There are very few airstrips in these areas, and the strips and airspace are precious to us,” he said. Over all, though, he said this relief effort had been more disciplined than past ones.
The United Nations assumed that there were at least four injured people for every dead person, he said, and medical facilities were overwhelmed caring for them. “Many local medical facilities in many instances were destroyed in the first place, and those not destroyed are totally swamped,” he said.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Nagappattinam for this article, Warren Hoge contributed from the United Nations, Steven R. Weisman and David Stout contributed from Washington and Mark Glassman contributed from New York.
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