Two more South Africans have died in disaster-stricken Phuket, Thailand, bringing the total number to four, the Department of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday.
Spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said the department had received reports of two more South Africans who died on the island holiday resort following the devastating earthquake and subsequent tidal waves that hit Southeast Asia on Sunday.
Mamoepa said a family of 10 was still missing in Phuket, while two South Africans were still missing in India.
The two South Africans who were missing in Sri Lanka have been located.
SABC news named the two South Africans whose deaths were reported first as Johannesburgers Daphney Coetzee and Paul Sender, who died when walls of water hit them while they were holidaying in Phuket.
Mamoepa said the names of the other two would be released as soon as possible.
”We will have more information later in the day. The Minister (Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma) expressed her heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families.”
It is believed that at least 300 South Africans are stranded in Phuket.
Plane to evacuate South Africans
A rescue team will fly to Phuket on Tuesday morning to bring back 198 South Africans, said Netcare 911 spokeswoman Mande Toubkin.
A 747 Boeing — on loan from Nationwide airlines — would leave Johannesburg International Airport at 11am on Tuesday.
”We are sending five doctors, five nurses and two paramedics,” she said.
Mamoepa added that two foreign affairs consular service officers and two home affairs officials would also be on the plane.
They would provide welfare and temporary travel documents for those South Africans trapped on the island.
Netcare 911 spokeswoman Mande Toubkin the company would send five doctors, five nurses and two paramedics on the 747 Boeing.
Toubkin said they would bring back those with minor injuries and women and children.
”We will have to leave some behind. We believe there are some 300 South Africans stranded but we only have 198 seats.”
The rescue team is expected to spend four or five hours in Phuket rounding up the stranded, before making the eight-hour journey back to Johannesburg.
The rescue mission is a joint effort between Netcare 911, Foreign Affairs and Discovery Health.
South Africa’s ambassador to Thailand, Ms Buli Ndzimande Pheto, arrived in advance in Phuket on Monday to coordinate the evacuation of South Africans.
After devastation, the grief
The scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami devastation hit home on Monday as the death toll accelerated to 25 000, aid agencies warned of the threat of disease and the United Nations braced the world for one of its biggest, costliest and most complex relief operations.
As putrefied bodies were piled on beaches in Sri Lanka and rescue teams reported a stench from human corpses mixed with dead animals in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a UN official said the international effort faced an unprecedented challenge in dealing with a disaster that touched at least nine countries.
Aid workers warned that typhoid, diarrhoea and hepatitis epidemics could break out within days because of polluted drinking water. But the death toll could more than double before disease spreads, with thousands still missing in Aceh and 30 000 unaccounted for on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, near the northern tip of the earthquake’s faultline.
The Indian authorities said at least 3 000 people were killed on the remote islands. They have failed to establish contact with six of the 38 inhabited islands, which lie 1 440km east of mainland India in the Bay of Bengal.
Dozens of tourists, including 12 Britons, were confirmed dead and hundreds more reported missing.
With food, drink, sanitation, shelter and healthcare urgently needed in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, a vast international rescue effort was under way on Monday night. Countries including Britain, the United States and Kuwait pledged millions of dollars in aid. Jan Egeland, chief UN relief coordinator, said it would take ”many billions of dollars” and years to help the region to recover.
Relief organisations were struggling to determine exactly what help was needed, and where, with communications cut or overloaded.
”We are used to dealing with disasters in one country. But I think something like this spread across many countries and islands is unprecedented,” said Yvette Stevens of the OCHA, the UN body that coordinates emergency relief.
Few countries in the region emerged unscathed from the destruction caused by the earthquake, whose epicentre was off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It sent tsunamis across the Indian Ocean without warning on Boxing Day, travelling 4 800km and destroying impoverished coastal villages as far away as Somalia, where officials said hundreds were dead. Hospitals were overwhelmed in the Thai resort of Phuket.
With a nationwide toll of more than 12 000, mortuaries in Sri Lanka were full. In the town of Panadura bodies spilled out into the sun from the hospital’s eight refrigerated chambers.
Across south-east Asia, hundreds more people were missing, including at least 200 police and family members believed buried under their barracks in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh, a police spokesperson said.
Western tourists and the wealthy did not escape. The 21-year-old grandson of Bhumibol Adulyadej, the king of Thailand, was killed on a jet-ski, while tourists from South Africa, 12 from Britain, and dozens more from France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, South Korea, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan were confirmed dead by their governments. Thousands were still missing, including 50 British teachers holidaying in Sri Lanka.
Troops unloaded bodies from military trucks in Banda Aceh, and volunteers laid out children’s bodies under sarongs in makeshift morgues.
”The biggest health challenge we are facing is the spread of waterborne diseases, particularly malaria and diarrhoea, as well as respiratory tract infections,” said Hakan Sandbladh, senior health officer at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva.
”We are particularly concerned about initial reports of destruction of hospitals and other health infrastructures in Sri Lanka.”
Andrew Sundersing, the relief director for World Vision in Sri Lanka, said: ”The first concern is waterborne diseases. Then there are thousands of people who don’t have homes and need to build them. In the long term we need to ensure people have permanent structures to live in.”
Oxfam is sending flood experts to Sri Lanka. ”There are a lot of dead bodies lying around and as they start decomposing, the water can easily be contaminated,” a spokesperson said.
They should not have died
Don McKinnon, the secretary general of the Commonwealth, called for talks on creating a global early warning system to issue tsunami alerts. There was little awareness of the potential danger from tsunamis in the Indian Ocean: the last big one was in 1833.
”At least two-thirds of the people who died should not have died,” a natural disaster expert, said Bill McGuire of University College London.
”They could have had an hour or so to get a kilometre or two inland or to reach high ground.”
In Thailand there was criticism of the government’s failure to provide adequate warning. ”The [meteorological department] had up to an hour to announce the emergency message and evacuate people but they failed to do so,” Thammasarote Smith, a former senior forecaster at the department, told the Bangkok Post.
”It is true that an earthquake is unpredictable but a tsunami, which occurs after an earthquake, is predictable.”
Warnings of a possible undertow on beaches issued by the department were broadcast on television and radio after the first waves hit. – Guardian Unlimited Â