BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Destruction on Indonesia's tsunami-wracked Sumatra island is the worst US Secretary of State Colin Powell has ever seen, the battle-seasoned war veteran said as he prepared for a meeting of world leaders to co-ordinate history's largest relief operation.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave," Powell said on January 5 after flying over flattened villages along Sumatra's northern coast, which was home to two-thirds of the at least 150,000 killed across Asia.
"I've been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I've never seen anything like this."
So far US$2 billion has been pledged to relief efforts in 11 countries hit by the December 26 quake off the western coast of Indonesia that triggered waves causing deaths as far away as East Africa.
But the challenges are enormous, with millions homeless and threatened by disease. The United Nations said it will build camps on Sumatra for up to 500,000 people.
Haggard, dehydrated tsunami survivors have been flooding hospitals. Psychologists were struggling to help children cope with unspeakable tragedy. Aftershocks added to the threats, with another strong quake felt on January 5, rattling the region but causing no known injuries.
Powell was one of the first to arrive in Indonesia ahead of a January 6 donor's conference, where world leaders planned to iron out problems in co-ordinating the relief operation and discuss the need for a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean. One already exists in the Pacific.
From an altitude of a few hundred metres, Powell and his entourage saw not a tree or building standing along the coast. City block after city block in Banda Aceh, the main city on northern Sumatra, had been swept clean. A large ship lay on its side, half submerged in water and mud.
The former US army general said he saw "how the wave came ashore, pushing everything in its path - cars, ships, freighters overturned - all the way up to the foothills, and then starting up the foothills until finally the waves came to a stop."
Money has poured in from around the world, the largest share from Japan.
"I think Japan must do as much as it can to help," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said, calling for companies in the world's second-largest economy to respond with donations to the kind of disaster seen "only once a century."
Convicts in Malaysia were donating money earned doing prison work, and war-torn Afghanistan planned to send doctors.
But the fragility of relief and rehabilitation efforts was underscored by the temporary closure on January 4 of the main, overstretched airport in Sumatra. On January 5, a load of aid supplies fell from a US helicopter over the island's city of Medan, hitting a shopping mall. No one was hurt.
Pilots, meanwhile, were ferrying survivors from hard-hit towns and villages in the region to medical help. But that created a new challenge for relief workers: bottlenecks at overcrowded hospitals.
About a dozen people lay on stretchers on the sidewalk outside Fakina Hospital in Banda Aceh. Many of the hospital's rooms had no power. Walls were flecked with blood and doctors had run out of stands for intravenous fluid bags, hanging them from cords strung across the ceiling.
"It's heartbreaking," said Leslie Ansag of Everett, Washington, a Navy medic from the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which was off Sumatra to help the rescue effort.
In Thailand, where more than 2,200 foreign tourists were among 5,000 killed, police said they were searching for a 12-year-old Swedish boy last seen leaving a hospital with an unknown man the day after the tsunami hit. Authorities said they could not confirm media reports that Kristian Walker had been kidnapped.
Police and UN officials have expressed fears that trafficking gangs will exploit the chaos of the disaster to abduct children and sell them into forced labour or even sexual slavery.
While children were getting help to cope with the psychological trauma of losing parents, brothers or sisters, aid agencies warned that they and other victims will need special attention for years to come.
In a psychiatric ward of Karapitiya hospital in the Sri Lankan city of Galle, an area hammered by the tsunami, some patients banged their heads against the wall. Some, wide-eyed, just stared vacantly, while others mumbled "the sea is coming."
(Agencies via Xinhua)
