deaths in the region and described the scene as catastrophic.

"The scale of devastation is huge, bigger than imagined," said Emil Agustiono, a government official helping coordinate the Aceh relief effort.

In Meulaboh, 110 miles southeast of this provincial capital in northern Sumatra, rescuers reported that lagoons had formed where communities had disappeared. Officials expressed fears that 40,000 of the 120,000 residents could have died in Meulaboh and the area around it. The district is about 60 miles from the epicenter of Sunday's undersea earthquake, which registered a magnitude of 9.0 and generated a massive tsunami that killed at least 121,000 people in 12 countries in South Asia and Africa.

The force of the tsunami swept the sea to the foot of mountains more than a mile inland, according to a reporter for the Reuters news agency who surveyed the area. Mangled cars littered streets, and fishing boats were strewn on top of other debris, but the city's maroon-domed mosque remained standing, the reporter said.

As governments of the 12 countries struggled to restore basic needs - potable water, medicines and food for millions affected by the disaster - relief operations were spurred on around the world. But the poorest survivors still wandered aimlessly amid rubble looking to bury their dead, or waited for food that had not arrived. The World Health Organization reported that "between three and five million people in the region are unable to access the basic requirements they need to stay alive - clean water, adequate shelter, food, sanitation and healthcare."

The first survivors were airlifted Thursday from Meulaboh to Banda Aceh. A U.S. Navy battle group raced to Sumatra as the United States and dozens of other countries shuttled tons of supplies to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, the countries that were the hardest hit. Although governments and international agencies had pledged at least a half a billion dollars to an unprecedented recovery effort, basic needs were still barely being met in the stricken area.

The Indonesia government said on Friday it would host an international tsunami summit on Jan. 6 to try to obtain more aid, the Reuters news agency reported.

On Thursday, in Banda Aceh, corpses lay along the muddy streets, the military could not meet a deadline for clearing them away that had been imposed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono after touring the area Tuesday.

The Indian government issued an erroneous tsunami warning Thursday, and people fled the southern Indian coast on jammed roads and climbed roofs in coastal areas of Sri Lanka and Thailand. Hours later, the government said the alert was a false alarm. There is no coordinated tsunami warning system in the region.

Periodic aftershocks from the Sunday quake were registered in South Asia on Thursday. Lava was spewing from a volcano on an island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian archipelago off the coasts of Burma and Indonesia, officials told news agencies. Previously, the crater emitted only gas.

Relief supplies were arriving from the United States, Australia, Europe and other Asian countries. Distribution centers were being established at Medan on Sumatra, south of Aceh, and at U Tapao, a Thai air base used by the United States during the Vietnam War. As many as 1,000 U.S. military personnel were expected at the Thai base in the next week, according to U.S. military officials.

President Bush said he was sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, his brother, to the disaster zone on Sunday. "In this hour of critical need, America is joining with other nations and international organizations to do everything possible to provide assistance and relief to the victims and their families," he said.

Four days after one of the largest earthquakes in history triggered a tsunami that smashed into coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia, half a billion dollars has been pledged to the relief effort, the United Nations said.

European nations have pledged millions in aid to South Asia relief. Britain said it was donating $95 million; Sweden promised $75.5 million; Spain, $68 million; and France, $57 million. Aside from the military commitment, the United States has announced an initial $35 million aid package. The largest single donation so far has been $250 million from the World Bank, announced Thursday by the organization's president, James D. Wolfensohn.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the donations have been generous but the need is vast.

"This is an unprecedented global catastrophe, and it requires an unprecedented global response," Annan said at a news conference.

"It is conceivable that one may not be able to fulfill every possible need for each of the countries and each of the coastal villages that has been destroyed. We should do all our best to really help them," he said. "If we fall short, we can at least be satisfied that we did everything possible."

The Indonesian Health Ministry reported that it expected further increases in the death toll. Sri Lanka reported 27,268 dead and about 1 million people displaced; India, at least 7,368 deaths, with 8,000 missing and possibly dead in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; Thailand, 4,500 dead; Somalia, 114; Burma, also known as Myanmar, 65; Malaysia, 65; Maldives, 69; Tanzania, 10; Bangladesh, two; and Kenya, one.

Indonesia

Indonesian officials continued to struggle with the lack of infrastructure in Aceh province.

Many local government officials were killed in the disaster, and authorities said others were missing or too traumatized to function. Officials said the federal government would send 300 workers from various ministries to replace them and reestablish government services.

At least 500,000 people were displaced and 100,000 homes destroyed in Aceh, officials said. A major highway to towns on the west coast is impassable, and there is no access by land.

Oliver Hall, head of the U.N. disaster assessment and coordination team in Indonesia, said local officials were "clearly in a state of great shock" and that "there's huge devastation in Banda Aceh and along the west coast."

"There's no extra water available," he added, warning that volunteers must bring their own provisions to the region. "There's no communication equipment available. There's no extra food available. It's a wasteland."

At night, Meulaboh is completely dark, and the electrical grid will take perhaps three months to fully restore, Agustiono, the government official, said. In Calong, a town north of Meulaboh, he said, only 5,000 of 15,000 people were reported to have survived. Most of the rescuers on the west coast are with the Indonesian military, supported by a Malaysian air force team, he said.

While the airport at Banda Aceh is busy with the arrival of relief-related flights, residents said little was getting through to them. Hungry crowds jostled around aid workers who tried to deliver biscuits to relieve hunger. Some drivers dared not stop.

Sri Lanka

Victims on the northern coast hit journalists and a soldier with wooden poles during a meeting with Prime Minister Mahina Rajapakse, who was led to safety by his bodyguards. Rajapakse was on a tour of affected areas in a region that has been controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels, who have fought government forces for 20 years.

The rebels, who seek independence in the northern and eastern portions of the country, appealed for international relief aid this week. There has been a cease-fire in the area since 2002, when Norway brokered a truce.

The Indian government reported that it had provided extensive rescue and relief assistance to Sri Lanka and other affected countries, including search ships and planes, medical camps staffed with doctors and equipment, air drops of supplies and $25 million in aid.

As international relief flights arrived in Sri Lanka, a brewery in Colombo, the capital, switched from beer to bottled water to help survivors, according to the relief organization Oxfam International.

Oxfam, which said it was assisting in the effort, reported that the Lion Brewery plant had produced 120,000 bottles of water for shipment to affected areas.

"With so much loss of life, how could you not help?" said Nausha Raheem, the manager of the plant.

India

In India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, where more than 4,000 people died, police and fire departments were put on high alert after the false alarm of a new tsunami.

The Indian Home Ministry was unapologetic. A.K. Ragosti, a senior official, said there was "no need to panic. We issued the alert as a precautionary measure."

Still, it was clear that the absence of a coordinated warning system in South Asia had caused large-scale panic. A warning system in the Pacific Ocean, which monitors several seismic networks, is designed to alert nations that potentially destructive waves could hit their coastlines within three to 14 hours.

This week, India announced plans to set up its own early warning system within two years. Meanwhile, the United Nations said Wednesday it believes the current warning system could easily be extended to countries around the Indian Ocean within a year.

Thailand

German, Swiss, Dutch, Australian and other forensic teams were helping identify bodies that were filling morgues. Many European tourists remained among the several thousand people missing along Thailand's southern coast, which is dotted with smashed and wrecked cars and building material.

"It will be challenging," said Karl Kent, head of a 17-member Australian federal police team, according to Reuters. "The scale is of a magnitude that Australia and other countries have not experienced," he said.

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Sumatra's West Coast Devastated

By Richard C. Paddock

The Los Angeles Times

Friday 31 December 2004

Deaths in remote areas push toll to 125,000; Powell to tour region.

Banda Aceh, Indonesia - The first survivors from an isolated area of the Sumatran coast were airlifted Thursday to the provincial capital, where they described a horrendous scene in which floodwaters covered a vast swath of land and probably killed more than half of one city's 100,000 people.

Survivors from the city of Meulaboh arrived with stories of being at sea for days and surviving by hanging naked to the minaret of a mosque. It was another grim detail of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. The death toll Thursday stood at 125,000 from Sunday's earthquake and tsunami that struck nations lining the Indian Ocean. At least 80,000 of the dead were from Indonesia.

There was still no clear picture of conditions in some remote villages or on islands off India and Indonesia, raising the specter that the disaster's toll could yet eclipse the 138,000 killed by a cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1991.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that more than 30 countries and organizations had pledged $500 million in aid, half of that from the World Bank.

"I would like to assure the people of the region that the entire United Nations family stands ready to assist, and we stand behind them," Annan said. "We will work with them in every way we can to rebuild their lives, livelihoods and communities devastated by this catastrophe."

President Bush, still smarting from charges that the United States was doing too little to assist in relief operations, announced that he was sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the region, along with the president's brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida.

The United States has pledged $35 million. Britain, France and Sweden have pledged considerably more.

"To coordinate this massive relief effort, firsthand assessments are needed by individuals on the ground," President Bush said in a written statement delivered at his ranch outside Crawford, Texas. The delegation, he said, would "meet with regional leaders and international organizations to assess what additional aid can be provided by the United States."

Bush said he was sending his brother because of his experience in recent months dealing with hurricane damage in Florida. White House Deputy Press Secretary Trent Duffy said that sending Gov. Bush underscored the importance of the mission.

"He's also the president's brother," Duffy noted. "I think it signifies the high level of importance that the president puts on this delegation."

This year the governor won accolades for his attention to recovery efforts after four hurricanes pummeled Florida in a six-week period. Details of the upcoming trip were not immediately available.

In India, Thailand and Sri Lanka, thousands of people fled inland Thursday after unfounded rumors that another tsunami was approaching.

David Nabarro, head of the World Health Organization's crisis team, said that as many as 5 million people in the region lacked essentials needed to survive.

An estimated 6,000 foreigners, many of them Europeans, were still missing. Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said that as many as 1,000 of his countrymen may have died, almost all of them on holiday at the beaches of southern Asia. More than 1,000 others from Scandinavian countries also were listed as missing.

The U.S. death toll was officially raised from 12 to 14, with seven dead in Thailand and seven more in Sri Lanka. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said an estimated 600 Americans who were listed as missing in the disaster zone had been found. But he said several thousand others had not been located. He said that in Sri Lanka, Americans had been showing up at U.S. consular offices wearing bathing suits, with no money or other clothing.

"Everything else was lost, and we're taking care of them," he said. "We're getting them places to stay, money to buy clothes, new passports, putting them in touch with their relatives."

The U.S. military sent a team of four forensic anthropologists from Hawaii to the region Thursday to help identify victims, said Army Lt. Col. David Buckingham, the group's director. The anthropologists normally work on identifying the remains of soldiers found on former battlefields of Vietnam and Korea. They will focus initially on identifying Americans and other foreigners, freeing local forensic experts to work on identifying citizens of their own countries.

The most positive news was that food and medicine were on the way. A U.S. C-130 military transport plane carrying bottled water arrived this morning at the bustling Banda Aceh airport. An Australian military plane, one of five daily flights by the Australians, followed shortly. Boxes of supplies were piled in an open-air warehouse. Helicopters clattered overhead.

The U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its strike group are now in place off the Indonesian coast, and military officials said that the amphibious Bonhomme Richard Marine Expeditionary Strike Group would reach its destination off the Sri Lankan coast within a week.

It will take longer, officials said, for eight slow-moving Marine cargo ships coming from Guam and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to reach southeast Asia.

"The tyranny of distance in this region really is amazing," said Navy Capt. Rodger Welch of the U.S. Pacific Command.

Arjun Katoch, a U.N. senior disaster response official, said Thursday that "the international aid effort is now gathering steam pretty well."

But that did little to diminish the horror of Meulaboh, which had been cut off since Sunday because bridges from Banda Aceh, about 110 miles to the north, were washed out. One of the survivors evacuated by air, 31-year-old Epayani, said thousands of corpses had been piled up by soldiers. But she said that even with those efforts, the water was turning black from decomposing bodies.

"Meulaboh has become like an ocean," said Epayani, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. "It is completely destroyed."

Another group of survivors evacuated by helicopter from Kecamatan Lhoong, 30 miles south of Banda Aceh, said that 24 of 28 villages in the area were destroyed, killing more than 9,000 of the 12,000 people who lived there. The reports from Sumatra's west coast added to the rapidly increasing death toll in Indonesia.

Mike Griffiths, a New Zealand environmentalist who is active in efforts to preserve northern Sumatra, flew over the island coast and videotaped the destruction. In addition to the damage in Meulaboh, he said, four towns - each with about 10,000 people - were wiped out, except for one where about 30 survivors were camped on a hill.

As the death toll here worsened Thursday, Indonesia accepted an offer from the Australian military to bring in troops and equipment to establish a modern terminal services operation at the Banda Aceh airport to speed up the unloading of aid.

Indonesia also gave the Australian military permission to fly aircraft within Aceh - an unprecedented step in opening the province, which had largely been closed to foreigners during the government's long-running battle with separatists there.

In Banda Aceh, the army accelerated efforts to pick up corpses from the streets, where thousands of bodies had been left rotting in the tropical heat.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who visited the area Tuesday, had directed the army to clear the streets of bodies within two days. But there was little chance of meeting the deadline.

Soldiers wearing masks to block the stench used long sticks to push bloated bodies onto plastic sheets, then loaded them onto trucks for burial in mass graves alongside the highway leading to the airport.

Meulaboh is one of the areas closest to the quake's epicenter. About 100,000 people lived there before the disaster struck.

Military doctors rappelled from helicopters into the city to begin treating the injured. Authorities also are attempting to reopen the airport so that planes can bring in shipments of food, bottled water and medicine.

"It's impossible to drink the water because it smells of dead bodies," said Epayani, who was taken by helicopter to Banda Aceh with her badly injured husband and three children.

A few isolated buildings were still standing surrounded by water, she said.

"From what people have seen from the air, it looks like the town of Meulaboh is 90% destroyed," said Michael Elmquist, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Indonesia. "There might not be many survivors. It got the full brunt of the earthquake and [tsunami]."

Epayani, exhausted by her ordeal, recounted a remarkable story of her family's survival.

Like other witnesses to the tsunami, she described a series of six waves. The first was the largest, about 15 feet high, she said. As it came roaring into the city, she said, all five family members quickly climbed up trees to safety on the roof of their house.

When the second wave hit, her 9-year-old son, Wira, fell off the roof and grabbed a cupboard that was floating by. When the cupboard began sinking, he clambered onto a mattress. The mattress floated away and he quickly became separated from the family. He spent two days drifting in the floodwaters before soldiers rescued him.

The third wave demolished the house. Epayani's husband, Aliman Hapri, a 38-year-old army sergeant, was washed away and spent the next day floating in the waters. During the ordeal, he was struck in the leg by a piece of wood. He has since developed gangrene and is in danger of losing the limb.

Epayani tried to stay with her other two children, Pardi, 10, and Nora, 9, but they were separated by subsequent waves. Remarkably, the sixth big wave brought the three back together near a mosque, and they were able to cling to its minaret.

The waves had torn off their clothes, and they were naked when soldiers rescued them.

For the next three days, the family lived in appalling conditions, like other survivors. They had nothing to eat and were drinking river water without boiling it because they had no pots or stoves.

"For three days the children were crying, asking for food," she recalled.

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Disaster Opens Window on Warring State

By Lindsay Murdoch

The Age, Australia

Saturday 01 January 2005

Satellite images show the shoreline of Banda Aceh on Tuesday, above, and on June 23.

(Photo: Digitalglobe)

Until the earth cracked open and huge waves smashed ashore during 25 minutes of terror last Sunday, Aceh was closed to the outside world.

The Indonesian Government had for years enforced strict bans on foreigners, including aid workers, entering the rebellious province at the tip of Sumatra.

Particularly after losing East Timor in 1999, Jakarta's military and political elite feared the presence of foreigners would encourage rebels fighting for independence.

The military also did not want foreign witnesses to its brutal crackdown on the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which has been waging an equally brutal guerilla war against its presence in the province for decades.

Yesterday, scores of planes carrying emergency relief supplies from around the world, including Australia, and hundreds of international aid workers were arriving in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh, a city of 70,000 that has been almost totally destroyed. Possibly one in four people is dead.

The Indonesian Health Ministry estimates just under 80,000 are dead across the province - a catastrophe beyond its ability to cope with or its resources.

As the scale of the death and destruction became clear, officials close to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave the go-ahead for foreign aid workers and foreign journalists to enter the province.

The military, long opposed to the presence of international journalists, even put small groups of them on the first military cargo planes that flew emergency supplies into Banda Aceh.

The military itself has been hard-hit, with hundreds of its soldiers killed and battalions effectively wiped out.

With hundreds of thousands of survivors in shock, struggling just to stay alive without food, water, medicines or shelter, soldiers have been left the grisly job of picking up and burying the bodies, which by yesterday were falling apart in Aceh's steamy heat.

The job is overwhelming.

Already, people are falling ill amid rotting corpses.

It will take many more days, if not weeks, for all the bodies to be buried, particularly those in the worst-hit towns that hug Sumatra's west coast that are closest to the epicentre of Sunday's earthquake.

The military knows it cannot cope alone. "Where is the United Nations?" a soldier driving a truck picking up bodies pleaded on Thursday.

"Please tell the United Nations to come."

A soldier in Meulaboh, possibly the worst-hit town, where half the population could be dead, said that maybe now people in Aceh who had been fighting for independence will realise the military is there to help them.

But the military's inability to quickly get aid to devastated areas has also fuelled some animosity towards them.

Some community leaders in Banda Aceh have accused soldiers, perhaps unfairly, of taking the first of the emergency supplies for themselves.

Aceh's fate changed forever after the 25 minutes of terror last Sunday.

Enemies in a long, bloody civil war suddenly found themselves side by side looking desperately for family members, struggling to stay alive amid indescribable devastation and carnage.

Everybody in Aceh will need as much outside help as they can get for a long time to come.

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