A mercy flight will return almost 200 South Africans who had been trapped in tsunami-hit Phuket to Johannesburg on Wednesday.
The bodies of four dead South Africans are expected to be on the same flight, a Boeing chartered from Nationwide airlines. The plane left South Africa for Phuket on Tuesday.
They were about 2 034 South Africans who had been in South East Asia when it was hit by devastating tsunamis, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Tuesday.
Of these travellers, 1 646 were in Thailand, said DFA spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa. Four of them were feared among the dead on the island of Phuket, where a family of ten South Africans was still missing on Tuesday afternoon.
Another two South Africans were reported missing in India, where 121 nationals were staying at the time of the disaster, on Sunday afternoon.
Refusing to release the names of the deceased, Mamoepa said: “This is a matter for the families. It is up to them if they want to make public the names”.
A Johannesburg man has already reportedly slammed media reports of the death of his brother on Thailand’s Phi Phi island.
Steven Sender told a radio station the body of his brother Paul had not yet been found.
Another of the deceased was reportedly Daphne Coetzee, of Poortview, on the West Rand, who had been holidaying on Phuket with her husband Ian and their sons Dean (12) and Michael (9).
The mercy flight was organised by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), Netcare, Discovery, and government.
The Boeing jetted out of Johannesburg International Airport at 11am on Tuesday with five doctors and 15 paramedics on board — and enough oxygen splints stretchers and other equipment to treat all but those patients requiring intensive care.
SAJBD volunteers in Phuket were working closely with local authorities in the region to track down all South Africans in hospitals and ensure ambulances and taxis were available to the South African delegation on its arrival, said Gauteng chairman, Zev Krengel.
These would ferry the doctors and paramedics to hospitals where they would assess the conditions of patients and determine whether they were in a fit state to make the long journey back home.
Around 15 South Africans were so far known to be in hospitals in Phuket, some of them “quite severely” hurt. Their injuries included secondary drowning, broken limbs, cuts and abrasions.
With only 220 empty seats on the plane, places would be allocated to the sick and wounded, then to children, women and, space allowing, to men.
SAJBD volunteers in Phuket were overseeing the concentration of all South Africans at a single collection point, said Krengel.
Foreign Affairs would waive travel document requirements of those stranded travellers who had lost their passports in the drama, but would take the fingerprints of those who boarded the flight.
Both they and any South Africans left behind would be provided with clothing, cold-drinks and dry rations, said Krengel.
He emphasised that this aid would be limited to South Africans and was not part of the greater relief operation in the area.
An evacuation operation would be organised in which the rest of the stranded South Africans in Thailand would be flown to Bangkok, from where they could connect international flights to South Africa, said the DFA.
Mamoepa said the Department of Home Affairs would establish an office at Johannesburg International Airport to help South Africans who may have lost their identity documents and passports in the disaster.
It would try to ensure the speedy processing of applications and delivery of documents to the homes of applicants, he said.
South Africans concerned about their loved ones have been advised to contact the DFA, on 012-351-1000/0035/50/63/64 or the SAJBD, on 011-645-2500.
Mamoepa asked non-governmental relief organisations or people wanting to provide assistance to countries affected to contact foreign affairs officers Johan van Wyk and Johan Paschals, on 084-514-7094 and 073-332-0842, or 012-351-1520/1466/1460.
2000+ South Africans in tsunami-hit areas
Mamoepa said the DFI had established that around 2 034 South Africa were in the region, of which four had been listed dead in Phuket, Thailand. Mamoepa said 10 members of a South African family were still reported missing in Phuket, while two South Africans were missing in India.
Mamoepa said the department would not release the names of any of the deceased. “This is a matter for the families. It is up to them if they want to make public the names.”
Foreign Affairs gave a breakdown of South Africans by region:
Thailand: 1646;
Sri Lanka: 37;
India: 121;
Indonesia: 42;
Maldives: 100;
Malaysia: 47;
Kenya: 8;
Singapore: 11 (who may have gone to Thailand form Singapore);
Burma: 5;
Another five South Africans were apparently travelling somewhere in the region prior to the disaster.
A website, phuketpc.com, listed South Africans Cornell Hattingh (33) and Paul Levine (23) as patients at the Phuket International Hospital.
Another website, www.phuket.com, listed South African Barbara Fobian as a patient at the Bangkok Phuket Hospital.
Neither of the websites listed any South Africans as dead.
Tsunami deaths top 50 000
Mourners in Sri Lanka buried their dead with bare hands today while rescue services struggled to reach areas of Indonesia still cut off from the rest of the world, two days after a tsunami devastated Indian Ocean coastlines and killed more than 50 000 people.
The vast majority of the dead in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and the Maldives were local residents, but hundreds of foreigners enjoying Christmas holidays in the sun were also killed by giant waves caused by Sunday’s earthquake of the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.
As aid agencies rallied to deal with the aftermath of what the United Nations has said may prove the costliest natural disaster in history, there were fears that the death toll could eventually double. Officials in Sri Lanka said today that nearly 19 000 people had died, and estimated that the toll in that country alone could rise to 25 000.
“This is unprecedented,” said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, while the International Red Cross warned that malaria and cholera could add to the scale of the disaster.
Desperate foreigners sought kin missing from holidays in south-east Asia, where news of an unclaimed, blond two-year-old boy brought dozens of hopeful parents to a hospital in Thailand’s resort island of Phuket. They all left disappointed – except for his Swedish uncle.
A man who identified himself only as Jim, said he found his nephew, Hannes Bergström, by looking on the internet.
“This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen,” he said.
Almost a third of the dead were children. Many thousands of people were still missing, and millions homeless in 11 countries from Indonesia to Somalia. About 19 000 people were killed in Indonesia, more than 4 000 in India and more than 1 000 in Thailand. In Sri Lanka’s severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies of the dead on roads for collection and burial. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even their bare hands.
Rescue workers battled to reach isolated coasts on the Indonesian island of Sumatra nearest the epicentre of the earthquake, which was the most powerful in 40 years. Soldiers and volunteers combed coastal districts and dug into rubble of destroyed houses to seek out survivors and retrieve the dead.
“We are working 24 hours to get out people out,” said Red Cross worker Tamin Faisil in Banda Aceh on Sumatra.
In Thailand’s once-thriving resorts, volunteers dragged scores of corpses – including many foreign tourists – from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels. The stench of death hung in the air for along a 30km stretch of beach in Thailand’s southern province of Phang Na, just above Phuket.
The country’s prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, warned that his country’s toll could double. Amid the devastation, however, were some miraculous stories of survival. In Malaysia, a 20-day-old baby was found alive on a floating mattress. She and her family were later reunited. The two-year-old boy in Phuket was recovering after he was found sitting alone on a road. Reports said his mother was missing, but that his father had been located at a different hospital.
For others, the pain of their loss was almost impossible to come to terms with.
“Where are my children?” asked 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday’s epicentre. “Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I’ve lost everything.”
The disaster could be history’s costliest, with “many billions of dollars” of damage, said UN undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.
Offers of aid had come in from around the world and hundreds of relief flights from two dozen countries were expected within the next 48 hours, he added
Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
Scores of people were also killed in Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, and the Maldives as the tsunami travelled 4 500km across the Indian Ocean to Africa, wreaking death and destruction as far as Somalia, where hundreds were killed, and the Seychelles, where three died.
It was the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, also located off Sumatra, which killed an estimated 36 000 people. Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of the waves could have saved lives.
The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours later. But governments insisted they couldn’t have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, drawn back by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a towering wall of water. – Guardian Unlimited Â