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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    The damage to critical infrastructure--everything from roads to pipes carrying clean water to local health ministries--is a double blow. Not only does it assist in the spread of disease, but it also makes getting assistance to victims harder. Even under the best circumstances, the roads to Banda Aceh "are hardly gorgeous North American highways," says a UNICEF official. Now they have been badly damaged, which is why it took days for relief workers just to reach the area where Indonesian government officials fear that at least 80,000 may have died. Once they are on the roads, the lack of functioning fuel stations compounds distribution problems. Trucks carrying supplies and medical equipment have to carry enough gasoline to get them back to the nearest airport, limiting their capacity to deliver critical necessities and contributing to bottlenecks throughout the supply chain. The Indonesian military air base at Halim Perdanakusma in Jakarta last Wednesday was packed with tons of medicine and food, and more than a dozen trucks were waiting outside the base to be unloaded. The difficulty delivering supplies over land has prompted some aid agencies to try other means. Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF have been trying to rent boats to deliver supplies to the western coast of Sumatra, but even that has presented problems. Vandertak says some skippers, fearing another tsunami, are too shaken to head back out to sea.

    In areas that are more accessible, coordination among governments and relief agencies becomes critical. In Velankanni, UNICEF official Paul Deveril says a lack of medicine is not the problem: "I'm quite surprised how much there is." The problem, Deveril says, is "whether there is a system to deliver the stuff." Where coordination is lacking, chaos results. In the southern town of Dodanduwa, Sri Lanka, H.P.P. Gamini, a diver whose mother was killed by the tsunami, says the aid distribution system "is completely chaotic. Whoever runs up to the truck and grabs gets food. The workers have no idea who actually needs aid." In one affected area of India, there was, if anything, an excess of giving. Local aid agencies stopped accepting donations of clothing because relatively poor fishermen and their families had become picky about what they were receiving, preferring only new saris and dhotis (long pieces of cloth worn tied around the waist by Indian men). By late in the week, a giant pile of used saris collected at a relief office in the small city of Tiruvarur remained untouched.

    Governments in the region are struggling to get hold of the problem, some more creatively than others. The Jayalalithaa state government in Tamil Nadu, India, which emcompasses Velankanni, hired IBM to set up a total management-information system to improve coordination among relief workers. "The system will get us critical information every day, mapping the data on a matrix to ensure that the supply of relief materials matches the demand," says Vivek Harinarain, the state's zonal relief commissioner.

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