After the Flood

With disease looming, the world launches a massive relief effort. Will the aid reach the victims in time?

By Bill Powell Monday, Jan. 10, 2005
    • KEMAL JUFRI / POLARIS FOR TIME

    Survivors fight for their share of water and noodles distributed in boxes in Indonesia two days after the tsunami hit

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    As with every disaster, though, raising money is one thing, but getting it to those who need it in time to stave off second-tier effects, such as hunger and disease, is a far more daunting proposition. As the spreading illnesses in the village of Velankanni demonstrate, providing immediate relief to vast numbers of displaced people is a vexing task. And the huge geographic swath affected by the tsunami, encompassing a dozen countries, only makes things more difficult. Despite the large amounts of cash pledged to help the victims, relief was still just trickling into many affected areas days after the disaster. "You're the first person to stop and ask us how we're doing," S.M. Roshan, a fisherman in Sri Lanka, told TIME 30 hours after the tsunami hit. "We have got no food, water or medical supplies from anyone."

    If that situation persists, the world may witness an even greater human calamity. The U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) warns that millions of people could face life-threatening maladies unless aid is delivered effectively and disease is contained. The lack of clean water, aid officials say, is the first, most basic problem. Dirty water acts as a gateway to a hellish spectrum of risks. The salination of wells, rivers and other water sources means that people are far more likely to ingest contaminated water in the days and weeks ahead, which is a particular risk to already weakened children. Examples of the consequences already abound. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Nur Asni, 42, a mother of five, gave her children water from a contaminated well near where she and other refugees had fled. "It tasted funny--rather salty and strange," Asni says, and now the children all have diarrhea. Also, standing pools of water left by the tsunami are "perfect breeding grounds" for mosquitoes carrying malaria or dengue, says Dick Vandertak, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in Hong Kong. Relief workers are monitoring affected areas for the possibility of a cholera outbreak, given that the disease spreads through dirty water and food.

    So far, the U.N. has set up 200 relief centers throughout the region, with more opening daily. First responders from the Red Cross have distributed cholera-treatment kits, and WHO has dispatched scores of public-health advisers to help coordinate treatment efforts. Emergency-response units from international charities and NGOs have arrived in what Vincent Janssens, medical director for Doctors Without Borders in Brussels, calls the zero phase of relief efforts--the treatment of basic trauma among victims injured by the tsunami. His organization was the first to reach devastated areas of Aceh Province on the western coast of Sumatra, but what it could do was limited, in part because of a lack of able-bodied assistance. "It's proved very difficult to rely on local providers because so many of them are dead too," Janssens says.

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