Choo Youn-Kong (Agence France-Presse) has a photo on the front page of people in Indonesia lined up for supplies. Chang W. Lee (Times) has a photo inside of people asleep on the floors of of a school in Kalmunai, Sri Lanka. Kim Cheung (Reuters) has a photo of the remains of a market on Phi-Phi island. Dimas Ardlian (Getty Images) has a photo of supplies arriving in North Sumatra. Richard Vogel (Associated Press) has a photo of workers on power lines "working to restore power." Ed Wray (AP) has a photo of survivors in Sri Lanka drinking from a tank. Santosh Verma (Times) has a photo of aid being distributed in Madras. Dibyangshu Sarkar (Agence France-Press) has a photo of a young child amidst the destruction (Cuddalore, India) eating a coconut. Edy Pumono & Jiwa Foto share credit for a photo (Times) of two people seated in front "of a ruined house." Binsar Bakkara has an especially powerful photo (AP) of an injured female. An uncredited photo from Daily Nation shows the waves on Sunday. Catherine Stebbins (Times? no organization is credited) has a photo of Dr. Kerry Siegh. Cory Lum (Times) has a photo of geophysicists Barry Hirshorn and Stuart Weinstein.
We're starting with the photos for a reason. Three e-mails asked if "failure" wasn't a little harsh to describe what happened on this end. I don't think so. Pictures are powerful and I should have been noting them from the start. Photo-journalists are journalists and they've been an important part of getting this story out and understood. I wish I'd been noting their contributions to this story from the start and regret that I didn't. My failure and I take the blame for it.
The Times continues to cover the issue powerfully and deserves praise for the text and the photos.
Focusing on the articles:
Bhupati brought her two boys, 8 and 6, to higher ground when the tsunami struck and ran back for the baby, Preetika, 2. The girl had been rescued by someone else and survived. The mother of three, searching frantically, did not.
"We don't know how to save these children's future," their uncle Kanakaraj, 35, said on Thursday, at a village wedding hall that had been turned into a relief camp. "A mother's care is needed." His concern for his brother's children was admirable, given what had happened to his own. All three were swept away in the tsunami on Sunday as their mother, Manonamani, tried, but failed, to save them.
A childless mother, motherless children - in one extended family, a microcosm of the way the water bruised its way across Asia. Many men died, but women and children appear to have died in even larger numbers.
[Amy Waldman's " Motherless and Childless, an Indian Village's Toll" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31india.html.]
Abdul Hamid Ansar woke up before dawn Thursday, whispered prayers, gulped down a cup of steaming tea and resumed his surreal new existence: overseer of Sri Lanka's coast of death.
Mr. Ansar, a shy, 42-year-old divisional secretary, the Sri Lankan equivalent of an American city manager, has led the search for bodies along a four-mile stretch of congested coastline where 9,000 people are believed to have been killed when a tsunami crashed in on Sunday. His small slice of Sri Lanka appears to have the highest death toll of any single community in Asia outside of Aceh Province in Indonesia.
Mr. Ansar's neighborhood, a seaside enclave of roughly 100,000 people on the east coast of Sri Lanka, no longer exists. Twenty-seven of his relatives are dead.
[David Rohde's "In a Corner of Sri Lanka, Devastation and Divisions" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31lanka.html]
Food drops and other aid trickled toward this region from around the world on Friday, but slowly enough that the injured and the stranded in many places still had to fend for themselves as the toll from "an unprecedented global catastrophe" surged past 120,000.
The human tally in Indonesia jumped after officials said that nearly 28,000 more bodies had been uncovered in Aceh Province, on the island of Sumatra, near the epicenter of Sunday's enormous undersea earthquake. The discovery brought the death count close to 80,000 in this country alone.
At least three times the number of dead may be seriously injured, their survival dependent on the arrival of urgent medical aid, international health experts said.
[Jane Perlez's "Many Still in Need as Aid Is Trickling to Stricken Area" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31quake.html]
At one camp, Zulkifli Zaelaini, 26, was trying to find medical attention for his father, a retired police officer whose hand was badly gashed after the disaster struck and was by now infected. "My father has been wounded now for three days, and no one cares," he said.
. . .
Many residents walk the streets wearing surgical masks or covering their noses with scarves to avoid the pungent stench of decaying bodies and raw sewage, the breeding ground for water-borne disease.
Tremors and aftershocks felt in recent days have regularly sent fearful residents scurrying outside those homes that are still standing.
[Eric Lichtblau's "In Indonesia's Worst-Hit Region, Relief Is Far From Swift" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31indo.html]
An expert in water sanitation from the World Health Organization has arrived in the Maldives to help determine the best way to restore safe water supplies, said Dr. Pino Annunziata, a member of the organization's emergency response team. He said that rainfall there would help to flush the salt out of the wells, but added that rain could also create stagnant pools of fresh water where mosquitoes could breed and spread malaria, which is already prevalent in many of the devastated areas.
Dr. David Nabarro, the director of crisis operations for the World Health Organization, said that a shipment of bottled water was being flown to the Maldives from Britain. He said the organization had been offered the use of a commercial plane heading from Manchester to Mali and had elected to fill the plane with water.
[Denise Grady & Lawrence K. Altman's "From All Corners, a Rush to Get Clean Drinking Water to Survivors in Stricken Areas" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31water.html]
It was 7 p.m. Seattle time on Dec. 25 when Vasily V. Titov raced to his office, sat down at his computer and prepared to simulate an earthquake and tsunami that was already sweeping across the Indian Ocean.
He started from a blank screen and with the muted hope that just maybe he could warn officials across the globe about the magnitude of what was unfolding. But the obstacles were numerous.
. . .
As he set to work, Sumatra's shores were already a soup of human flotsam. Thailand to the east was awash. The pulse of energy transferred from seabed to water, traveling at jetliner speed, was already most of the way across the Bay of Bengal and approaching unsuspecting villagers and tourists, fishermen and bathers, from the eight-foot-high coral strands of the Maldives to the teeming shores of Sri Lanka and eastern India.
In the end, Dr. Titov could not get ahead of that wave with his numbers. He could not help avert the wreckage and death. But alone in his office, following his computer model of the real tsunami, he began to understand, as few others in the world did at that moment, that this was no local disaster.
With an eerie time lag, his data would reveal the dimensions of the catastrophe that was unfolding across eight brutal hours on Sunday, one that stole tens of thousands of lives and remade the coasts of the Asian subcontinent.
[Andrew C. Revkin's "How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31wave.html]
Experts say that thousands of deaths might have been avoided if warning systems had been in place to alert the people around the rim of the Indian Ocean of the tsunami. No such system exists there now, although the United States has such a system in place for countries of the Pacific basin.
Those who design and use the wireless technology known as Short Message Service, currently used for chatter and advertisements, say it could be used to jumpstart governments' warning networks.
[John Schwartz's "Text Messaging Pushed for Use as Disaster Warning Systems" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/asia/31message.html]
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need to add to the $35 million set aside by the United States for immediate relief, but that the money would be available when the time came to distribute it, once assessments are made. The official said that $500 million in government aid had been raised so far around the world, and that this had been matched by a like amount of private contributions.
[Steven R. Weisman & David E. Sanger's "In Efforts to Organize Aid, Powell and Governor Bush Will Tour Ravaged Areas" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31policy.html]
Some here blame fate for the tsunami, others blame geology. But other factors also determined who lived and who died on that morning.
Biology, for one: the men on shore had the speed to outrun the towering wall of water, and the strength to hold onto whatever they could as the water tried to snatch them away. Sociology, for another: here, the men are the providers, and were thus away at sea about six miles from shore, which on that day proved the safest haven. The women fell prey at home, or at the fish market where the water barreled in. On a Sunday morning, the tsunami found many of the children at their homes just feet from the sea, rather than at a safer distance, at school.
[Amy Waldman's "Motherless and Childless, an Indian Village's Toll."]
Staff members also immediately traveled into the disaster zones. Celestine M. Devasahayam, a supervisor in India, set out for slums in Madras in a flooded coastal area, using a rowboat at one point to reach a hard-hit neighborhood. What he and his partners from another relief agency found was a former fishing village where not a single house was still standing, where bodies were simply piled up, and where children were searching for parents, he said.
"They were so desperate," he said in a telephone interview. After he returned inland, he and other relief workers directed medical crews to the area.
[Eric Lipton's "Even at Charity Used to Aiding, It's a Scramble."]
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need to add to the $35 million set aside by the United States for immediate relief, but that the money would be available when the time came to distribute it, once assessments are made. The official said that $500 million in government aid had been raised so far around the world, and that this had been matched by a like amount of private contributions.
[Steven R. Weisman & David E. Sanger's "In Efforts to Organize Aid, Powell and Governor Bush Will Tour Ravaged Areas."]
Among them was Bustamam Zainal Abidin, 37, a car salesman who lost his wife and their four children, ages 1 to 10, to the raging waters. He was not at home when the tsunami hit on Sunday, but neighbors reported that all five family members had been swept up in the floods.
"I have nothing, zero," he said. "Where my house was, it's like a sea now. I couldn't even be there to help my family." Other members of the mosque are missing and presumed to be dead as well.
[Eric Lichtblau's "In Indonesia's Worst-Hit Region, Relief Is Far From Swift."]
At home, Manonamani was feeding Naveen Kumar, 8, and watching Priya Dharsini, 10, play with Rumani, 3, when the sea reared up and she heard screams. She grabbed Naveen and Rumani, while Priya ran at her side. But Manonamani did not know how to swim, and when the water overtook them, the children slipped from her hands.
"I had no power to run away," she said. "I lost them." Kanakaraj found her unconscious in a house, then found his brother's children safe on a top floor. "My own children I could not see," he said. He found their bodies two days later.
Manonamani said, "I would have been happy if even only one of my own had been saved."
[Amy Waldman's "Motherles and Childless, an Indian Village's Toll."]
Severe shortages exist in all the affected regions, but reports from health officials suggest that the situation may be the most dire in Indonesia and the Maldives.
[Denise Grady & Lawrence K. Altman's "From All Corners a Rush to Get Clean Drinking Water to Survivors in Striken Areas."]
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need to add to the $35 million set aside by the United States for immediate relief, but that the money would be available when the time came to distribute it, once assessments are made. The official said that $500 million in government aid had been raised so far around the world, and that this had been matched by a like amount of private contributions.
[Steven R. Weisman & David Sanger's "In Efforts to Organize Aid, Powell and Governor Bush Will Tour Ravaged Areas."]
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need to add to the $35 million set aside by the United States for immediate relief
. . .
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need to add to the $35 million . . .
A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that so far, there was no need . . .
