Tsunami relief effort 'chaotic'
2007-04-05 09:06
Gizo, Solomon Islands - Aid workers helping survivors of a tsunami disaster in the Solomon Islands complained on Thursday that the relief efforts are chaotic and lack resources, warning of growing health risks for thousands left homeless in squalid camps.
The United Nations put the death toll from Monday's magnitude-8.1 earthquake and tsunami at 34. Solomons officials have previously said 28 deaths were confirmed, but more were expected. Authorities have estimated the number of homeless at around 5 600.
There has been no official tally of the missing.
"We are under-resourced, we need bigger vehicles," said disaster official Jonathan Taisia at the main Red Cross centre in hard-hit Gizo town, as a chartered helicopter landed with the latest load of tarps and food.
But much of the aid coming into Gizo wasn't being distributed beyond depots because of vehicle shortages, and a lack of workers to load trucks or clear debris that has severed road links to outlying villages, he said.
Shortage of boats
Drinking water is in extremely short supply on Ghizo, the island on which Gizo town sits, as is food and medicine. Most aid was being delivered to Munda, on a nearby island, and a shortage of boats hampered efforts.
Most of the local fleet of canoes and other vessels was destroyed by tsunami waves up to five metres high that crashed ashore within minutes of the offshore quake on Monday morning.
In Honiara, the capital, officials scrambled to find enough supplies to cope with the disaster in the northwest of the country, an impoverished chain of some 200 islands with a population of around 550 000.
"The recovery operation is not going as fast as expected because of delays here in Honiara," Alfred Maesulia, an official in the prime minister's department, told The Associated Press. "Suppliers don't have the volumes of relief materials we need to send."
Risk of disease
The risk of disease mounted. A senior Red Cross official said some children in camps in Gizo were suffering diarrhoea. National Disaster Management Council chairperson Fred Fakarii warned cholera, malaria and other diseases were also a potential threat.
At a makeshift clinic at a survivor camp on high ground behind Gizo, nurse Hugo Losena bandaged bone fractures, stitched cuts and struggled to treat internal bleeding - the most common injuries among the three dozen people who have slept on sodden mattresses at the camp since Monday's earthquake and tsunami.
- AP