Relief Aid Trickles Out to Desperate Cyclone Victims

ABOARD A BANGLADESH RELIEF PLANE —  The horn suddenly wailed above the wind’s roar, and a light over the cargo plane’s yawning rear door flashed the green “drop” signal.

From 300 feet high, a half-dozen burlap sacks of bread tumbled in the cloudy sky, some spilling wildly open as they fell, finally splashing into the flooded paddies and muddy hamlets of Kutubdia Island.

Hundreds of people ran and splashed from all sides to collect the only real food most probably have seen in the five days since a killer cyclone and tidal wave left their stricken island awash in churning water and death.

“These are our brothers and sisters below,” said flight engineer Eskander Azad. “And the little bread we bring them is not much.”

Indeed, Bangladesh’s emergency relief effort remained pitifully inadequate Sunday as millions of storm survivors struggled to stave off hunger and disease. Only a trickle of supplies needed to prevent thousands of deaths is reaching the worst-hit southeast coast and low-lying offshore islands.

At least 125,661 people were confirmed dead, and the final toll is expected to top 200,000, said Ali Hasan Qureshi, secretary general of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, the largest charity in the country.

The crisis appears far beyond the impoverished country’s limited resources. The air force is flying only two Soviet-built AN-32 cargo planes and two helicopters to deliver supplies to thousands of far-flung villages and islands devastated by the storm’s fury. They are delivering barely 30 tons a day.

“Just a few C-130s would make a huge difference,” Azad said. “But the world is so tired of suffering.”

Price gouging and hoarding is also impeding the tiny relief operation. The cost of hiring a truck in Dhaka has doubled to $180 a day. The price of flattened rice, a local staple, is up 85%. Prices also are up for jerrycans, medicine and other needed supplies.

“The situation is grave in most of the affected areas and is deteriorating very quickly,” one relief worker said. In some areas, survivors are getting desperate, creating the threat of anarchy. On roads leading from the stricken port city of Chittagong, groups of youths stop vehicles to demand food and money to buy supplies.

People punch and shove in the mobs surrounding trucks with drinking water and at the handful of food centers run by local and international relief groups. Patients at one rural hospital reportedly rioted for lack of medicine.

There appears little organization or coordination. Communications to Chittagong, the second-largest city, remain cut. Despite the disaster, government offices were closed last Wednesday and Friday for holidays.

Fierce daily thunderstorms further hamper relief efforts. And at least three helicopters are being used to ferry officials, diplomats and an increasing number of foreign journalists to view the disaster, rather than to carry supplies to the victims.

“The size of the disaster was at first underestimated,” another relief official said. “And the logistics in this country are a nightmare.”

Inland villages have gotten little outside help. No relief has reached Midlesonaichori, only 12 miles by road from Chittagong. The storm flattened most homes and toppled brick walls. Several hundred people have no rice, drinking water or medicine.

Mohammed Senkandar, 65, lost his wife, grandson and granddaughter when the storm smashed his mud-brick house. It also destroyed the carefully nurtured rice paddies he had planned to harvest in three weeks.

“I can’t go on,” he said numbly. “I have nothing left. Nothing.”

Food reserves in many villages were already low, waiting for the impending harvest. The tidal wave of saltwater has flooded millions of acres, ruining the standing crop and potentially poisoning the fields for months or years ahead. Moreover, the monsoon season begins next month.

“The cyclone could not have happened at a worse time,” said Robin Needham, country director of CARE.

About 350,000 people jammed 62 concrete shelters built by the Red Cross after a 1985 storm and 228 smaller shelters erected by the World Bank after a devastating cyclone in 1970. Some survivors crowded into mosques, schools or other relatively sturdy structures.

On one island, Sonidia, all 650 people survived the night of terror in the Red Cross shelter, although swirling water rose to the entrance, which is 15 feet high. In 1970, the island’s entire population perished.

“A lot of people had been cynical about these shelters,” said Denis McClean, a Geneva-based representative of the International Red Cross. “They cost $100,000 each. You have to bring all the concrete, all the building materials. But they saved people’s lives.”

A separate government plan to build 3,500 shelters after the 1985 cyclone never got off paper. And McClean said full evacuation was probably impossible.

“Over 7 million people were at risk,” he said. “How do you evacuate 7 million people in a day?”

Many peasants refused to leave their tiny homes, or had nowhere to hide on the flat, treeless deltas and islands. Others simply couldn’t flee.

“Every five minutes, the radio said to go, the cyclone is coming,” said Hasan, a 33-year-old sailor whose daughter was killed in the tidal surge. “But how? We have no car. There was no bus, no cycles to take us away.”

At least 15,133 people, including 10 local Red Cross volunteers, perished on Kutubdia as the tidal wave washed over the island. The rest now cling to the few patches of land still above the brown muddy water flooding a checkerboard of once-lush paddies.

From the air, virtually every structure appears roofless or flattened in dozens of hamlets. A three-story concrete storm shelter stood amid rubble-strewn, wind-torn patches that once were homes.

Dozens of human and animal bodies were washed up on embankments or sprawled bloated in the mud. Fishing trawlers were stranded miles inland. One ship had crushed a home.

As the aging plane shuddered and wheeled above the island, load master Khorshed Bablu and his crew pushed sack after sack of plastic-wrapped bread out the rear door.

On one pass, the horn buzzed on and on as the plane flew over a long, leveled seaside settlement. Hundreds of people raced through the mud and water as sacks plummeted downward. Others frantically waved white strips of cloth. Virtually all the sacks landed in the water. Many burst open on impact, spraying the bread in a wide arc. How much food was ruined could not be determined.

Other sacks were dropped on similarly suffering Maheshkali and Sandwip islands. The five-ton airdrop flight from Dhaka lasted two hours, the first of three trips the weary pilots planned for the day.

“We can only drop as much as we can carry--and we carry very little,” Azad said. “I personally feel very badly for the people. And even though some of us are working very hard, we are not doing enough for the poor people.”

The second plane flew a dozen journalists and five tons of flattened rice and biscuits to Chittagong, where two helicopters were to ferry them farther. The Red Cross and private relief organizations set up their own distribution systems, hiring trucks and boats to deliver blankets, water-purification tablets, oral rehydration kits and other desperately needed goods.

Near the Chittagong airport, a fisherman sat in his wooden boat, ripped from its anchor and dumped 2 miles inland. “We don’t know how we will get it back to water,” he said.