U.S. help a big boost in Aceh aid distribution
U.S. help a big boost in Aceh aid distribution
Associated Press, Kuede Teunom, Aceh
An outpouring of global aid began trickling into Indonesia's stricken villages on Sunday, as bulldozers cleared debris- cluttered roads and American helicopters shuttled supplies to desperate victims of Asia's tsunami disaster.
Officials across the Indian Ocean region said bottlenecks that have left boxes of supplies in warehouses with insufficient transport were easing. Aid workers in Indonesia, the nation hardest hit, said critical supplies were finally reaching inland villages that needed them most.
A big boost for aid distribution in Indonesia came with the arrival on Saturday of the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
"The need is desperate. There is nothing left to speak of," said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vorce as the U.S. relief operation went into its second day with helicopters shuttling between the provincial capital of Banda Aceh and devastated coastal villages on Sumatra.
The giant aircraft carrier and four other U.S. Navy vessels, crewed by more than 6,500 sailors and Marines, moved into position on Saturday off Indonesia to begin one of the largest U.S. military operations in Southern Asia since the Vietnam War.
From a low-flying helicopter, the scene for some 110 kilometers down the shoreline from the provincial capital of Banda Aceh was that of a veritable skeleton coast.
One after another, communities well-rooted for generations had been obliterated in moments. Bleached concrete bases were all that remained of most substantial structures. Nothing was visible of flimsier village houses except for some corrugated iron roofs crumpled up like paper.
Only a few mosques remained intact, surrounded by bare wastelands. Thousands of emerald green rice paddies had been peeled away, replaced by fetid swamps, mud, mangled tree trunks and sea slime.
The thundering wall of water, powered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake centered not far off the coast, pounded through the towns and paddies and even up hillsides, surging through inlets deep into the interior.
When a helicopter landed at Kuede Teunom, a town 110 kilometers southeast of Banda Aceh, several hundred people waited anxiously for relays of Indonesian soldiers to quickly unload crates of biscuits and water. The troops, rifles slung across their backs, had moved in to prevent mobs like those which rushed the helicopters on Saturday.
About 8,000 people, from a population of 18,000, were killed in the town, Indonesian journalist Alfinn Hanzah estimated, and the survivors urgently needed rice, medicine and gasoline. Hanzah, from the Pena Indonesian News Service, had been in the town for two days.
In the shattered Sumatran fishing village of Meulaboh, aid workers set up a refugee camp to distribute boxes of supplies. Five American doctors flew to decimated village from the USS Shoup, as four Indonesian frigates filled with aid docked offshore.
In Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra and a main delivery point for aid, relief centers operated out of tents and passed out boxes of supplies to orderly crowds. Truck convoys delivered goods in steady streams, as planes constantly unloaded aid at the Banda Aceh airport.
"I'm happy to report that we are not having too many difficulties with our distribution," said Heather Hill, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, which passed out 50 tons of rice and eight tons of biscuits and dried noodles in Aceh province on their first day of operation on Saturday.