Help On The Way

At the Paris headquarters of cementmaker Lafarge Group on Dec. 26, the devastation ran deep. The firm had a plant in Lho Nga, Indonesia, 25 km west of Banda Aceh, perilously close to the earthquake's epicenter off Sumatra. A killer wave destroyed the plant's 35 buildings as well as a seaside complex that housed 100 local employees and their families. As of last week, Lafarge had accounted for only 294 of its 625 workers based at the plant.

The company responded quickly. A day after the disaster, a Lafarge team based in Indonesia flew search, rescue and medical personnel to Banda Aceh to hunt for the missing and care for survivors. The team brought 450 employees and their kin to emergency relief centers and hired trucks and planes to ship food, water and medicine to the area. The Paris headquarters donated €767,000 to affected countries, and continues to collect contributions from its 75,000 employees around the world. It will soon dispatch a team to plan the rebuilding of the Lho Nga plant and nearby villages. "It's a human challenge of massive scale," says Alain Guillen, vice president for social policies at Lafarge.

Across Europe, corporations and individuals have stepped up to aid a stricken region where they have been working and playing for generations, and with which they feel a strong bond. They've pledged tens of millions of euros, millions of doses of drugs, and the people and equipment needed to reconstruct damaged infrastructure.

On Dec. 30, Christopher Bland, chairman of the U.K. telecommunications group BT, began phoning top executives at Britain's 20 largest companies to urge them to donate to the relief effort, but he soon gave up because so many of those he called had already made large pledges. "I think it's an unprecedented response in terms of corporate giving," Bland told Time. "It's really struck a chord." BT has sent seven telephone engineers to Indonesia; another six leave this week. The company also donated $934,000 to Britain's Disasters Emergency Committee and provided 150 volunteers to answer the charity consortium's phones.

Among Europe's biggest corporate donors is Germany's Deutsche Bank, which wrote a check to a relief fund for €10 million. Deeply moved upon his return from flood-damaged regions of India on Jan. 4, chief executive Josef Ackermann learned that the bank's employees had already collected more than €1 million in donations. "I proposed to the board that in this extreme situation, let us do something extraordinary," Ackermann says. "Let's top off the employee donations so that Deutsche Bank as a whole can make a donation of €10 million."