Choppers to rescue

Helicopters dropped aid to clamouring crowds in tsunami-hit Indonesian villages on Sunday but were unable to land, a week after the waves wa...

Helicopters dropped aid to clamouring crowds in tsunami-hit Indonesian villages on Sunday but were unable to land, a week after the waves washed away entire towns around the Indian Ocean.

The US and Australian military aircraft were part of a multinational relief effort, with 2 billion pledged so far, that is battling logistical obstacles and torrential rains to deliver aid to millions of the needy.

The UN said it could take two weeks just to reach some tsunami survivors and predicted the death toll from the waves that followed a massive earthquake, now at almost 130,000, would rise to 150,000.

8216;8216;The carnage is of a scale that defies comprehension,8217;8217; said US President George W. Bush, as an American aircraft carrier arrived off the coast of Sumatra and Washington sent 1,500 troops to Sri Lanka.

The new year brought a surge of cash pledges. Japan vowed half a billion dollars to help and Washington raised its contribution tenfold to 350 million. The aid drive is vast but cannot be big enough. UN health officials say disease is set to kill maybe 50,000 more people.

Danish Red Cross chief Jorgen Poulsen, in the devastated city of Banda Aceh, said waterborne diseases like dysentery were a ticking 8216;8216;time bomb8217;8217;. 8216;8216;We hope we can avoid cholera. The problem is we have already seen people vomiting in town,8217;8217; he said.

Forty countries lost nationals in addition to the 13 countries hit directly by the tsunami. Indonesia lost over 80,000 people, Sri Lanka nearly 30,000, India 12,700 and the 5,000 killed in Thailand included many tourists.

Story continues below this ad

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, calling the cataclysm the 8216;8216;largest disaster we have had to deal with8217;8217;, said reconstruction would probably take five to 10 years. He planned to visit Indonesia on Thursday and would probably issue a world appeal for more relief from there, officials said.

Water is only just beginning to drain out of parts of Banda Aceh, revealing the full extent of the damage and yet more bodies to count. 8216;8216;I8217;ve never seen anything like this. We8217;ve seen bodies 20 miles out to sea. You just cannot describe it,8217;8217; said Captain Larry Burt, commander of a helicopter air wing on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln anchored off Sumatra.

In Banda Aceh on Sunday, clean-up crews and exhausted soldiers found it hard to know where to start. Hundreds of decomposing bodies lay in the streets. Fires burned round the clock to clear wooden debris. It had been another long night, with quake aftershocks again sending panicked residents fleeing into the streets.

World Vision Australia Chief Tim Costello, who visited devastated areas of Sri Lanka, said the scenes were like 8216;8216;the apocalypse8217;8217;.

Story continues below this ad

Sri Lanka says more than 5,000 are missing, most in rebel areas, but the Tamil Tigers put the figure at 18,000.

Relatives and friends flying to Asia to find loved ones scoured photos of corpses on bulletin boards. More than 7,800 foreigners are missing.

Meanwhile, 10 tourists from the UK, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland were found alive on Weh, off Aceh. 8212;Reuters