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.