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Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster whose scale invites comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.The official death count after Cyclone Nargis is 15,000, and the Thai Foreign Minister says he has been told that 30,000 people are missing.But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken Irrawaddy delta, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be several times higher.Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children told The Times: “I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.”The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.Four days after the Burma cyclone, which struck the flat agricultural area south of Rangoon, there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims.Seven townships have been designated as “priority one” disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed. “Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem,” said Mr Kirkwood. According to government’s figures at least 10,000 people have died in the town of Bogalay alone.Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water.They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever buildings remain standing.Burma's junta refused foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami, in which between 60 and 600 of its citizens are reported to have died, but this time the sheer scale of the slowly emerging disaster seems to have forced it to change its mind."We will welcome help...from other countries because our people are in difficulty," said Nyah Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister, in a rare TV appearance.Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma's agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta. It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma's former capital and home to 5 million people.The town-by-town list of dead and missing announced by Mr Win showed 14,859 deaths in the rural and remote Irrawaddy delta, with about two thirds of the fatalities in Bogalay, 90km (55 miles) southwest of Rangoon. Most apparently died in the 12ft storm surge wave that accompanied the cyclone, it was reported.There were 59 deaths reported in Rangoon, where today people could be seen in long queues for bottled water. Phones were down and there was still no electricity."Generators are selling very well under the generals," said one man waiting outside a shop, reflecting resentment on the streets to what many described as a slow warning and response.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
