Three South Africans are still missing somewhere in Thailand with two more unaccounted for in India after Sunday’s devastating tsunami in the wake of a massive quake off the shores of Sumatra.
The bodies of four South Africans known to have died were being ferried back to the country on Wednesday on a mercy flight expected to touch down at Johannesburg International Airport sometime between 1pm and 2pm.
According to the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, they are Morris Isaacson, Roy Fitzsimmons, Daphne Coetzee and Dolores Ribeira.
With no word at all yet from Paul Sender, Avadya Berman and Nicki Liebovitz they were classified as ”acutely missing”, said SAJBD Gauteng chairperson, Zev Krengel.
SAJBD volunteers on the ground in Phuket were working round-the-clock to trace them, checking the hospitals and mortuaries.
Sender’s girlfriend, Gaby Baron, initially feared dead, was actually ”alive and well” in Bangkok, airlifted there earlier on in the drama. Also safe in Bangkok were Gary and Ilana Sweidan, he said.
Among the injured on the plane were seven members of the Panaino family. Worst injured among them seven-year-old Chane, who was released from intensive care in Phuket on Tuesday after sustaining head injuries.
Her father and grandfather had been missing, feared dead, but ”popped up” at the Krabi relief centre — a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Phuket — on Tuesday, dazed and bewildered after being airlifted from Phi Phi island, said Krengel.
The Department of Foreign Affairs had no reports of anyone missing anywhere other than Thailand and India ”at this stage”, said spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa.
However, he appealed to South Africans in Southeast Asia, Somalia, Kenya, the Seychelles, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Comores to report their presence to their nearest South African mission. Families concerned about missing loved ones should also come forward, Mamoepa said.
Although the mercy flight — put on by the foreign affairs department, Netcare, Discovery Health, the SAJBD, and other private sponsors — had space on board for 220 people, only 65 South Africans were picked up at Phuket Airport and its hospitals, said Krengel.
They included the injured, people with no travel documents and those without any money. The rest of the 1 646 South Africans in Thailand when the quake hit appeared to have made their own way home.
A Pretoria man with serious chest injuries was among the patients on board the flight, said Netcare 911 chief executive officer, Dr Ryan Noach. Although in a stable condition, he would be evacuated to Unitas hospital in Centurion on arrival in the country.
Noach said emergency vehicles and personnel were on standby on the apron at Johannesburg International Airport to evacuate the other patients, eight of whom were moderately injured. Most had cuts, scrapes and bruises.
Undertakers were also on standby to ensure the safe passage of the four bodies.
There were 12 children on the flight, said Noach, adding that Netcare had arranged for all the South African evacuees and team members to be debriefed and receive trauma counselling.
It had been a ”heartwarming” experience telling ”ecstatic” families their loved ones were safe, said Krengel. ”It was quite an emotional thing.”
2000+ South Africans in tsunami-hit areas
Mamoepa said on Tuesday that 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 from 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.
Aid arrives in tsunami disaster zones
Flights packed with ready-made meals, medicines and doctors were on Wednesday arriving in countries ravaged by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean which has left almost 70 000 people, half of them children, dead.
Governments worldwide have pledged tens of millions of dollars to help victims of the disaster, which struck on Sunday. Tens of thousands were killed and millions left homeless in almost 11 countries from south-east Asia to Africa.
Millions of individuals have responded to the tsunami disaster, making donations of cash and other items. ”The response has been overwhelming,” Avinash Singh Gill, the first secretary at the Indian high commission in Singapore, said. The high commission has been accepting cheques and bank drafts to fund India’s aid and reconstruction effort.
Aid agencies stressed that cash was the most appropriate gift, because it afforded the most flexibility to meet changing needs on the ground.
In Hong Kong, the actor Jackie Chan donated $64 282 to Unicef for relief work in the countries pummelled by the earthquake and resulting tidal waves, a fund statement said. The city’s leading businessman, Li Ka-shing – Asia’s richest man – contributed $3,1-million.
Governments have pledged almost $100-million to the relief effort, with Japan, the EU and US leading the way. Tons of food and medical supplies are also being shipped by UN agencies, the Red Cross and non-government agencies.
The British government pledged £15-million to the international aid effort, and the secretary of state for international development, Hilary Benn, said the money was ”the first phase” of the UK’s commitment to helping the afflicted countries.
Robert Holden, the operations manager at the World Health Organisation HQ in Geneva, warned that relief agencies faced ”a huge task of prioritisation and co-ordination”. Holden told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the search and rescue phase was ”coming to an end” and that the risk of disease outbreak was high.
”There is a lot of potential for waterborne diseases, diarrhoeal diseases breaking out,” he said. ”We are working with the authorities on the ground to try and put in place, very quickly, the ability and the provisions to be able to make safe their drinking water through the provision of chlorine tablets and so on.
”It’s an astronomical logistical problem. We’ve never been faced with anything like this previously. We’ve got a huge geographical area, a number of countries affected.”
Some government officials and NGOs expressed concern that aid was piling up at distribution points because of impassable roads in Aceh, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, one of the areas hardest hit by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Vaitai Usman, a woman in her mid-30s, gestured angrily at her filthy sarong, saying it was the last of her possessions, as the first relief teams arrived in Banda Aceh city, Aceh’s provincial capital. ”There is no food here whatsoever. We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine. I haven’t eaten in two days,” she said.
Survivors there said they were running short of food, and aid officials also warned that the extensive relief effort was open to corruption in a province in which the governor is on trial for allegedly stealing from the state budget.
”Most problematic … is the food, medicine and the clothes that may be taken either by private hospitals, military users or by traders who will resell it,” said David Macdonald, the country programme manager for Oxfam Great Britain.
Indonesia
Aceh bore the brunt of the quake and the tsunami that followed. Supplies – including 175 tons of rice and at least 100 doctors – have reached Banda Aceh.
Four hospitals across Aceh were being set up, and the navy was sending ships loaded with tons of food and medicine to the island’s west coast, which is impossible to reach overland.
”This is first time we are able to send help there,” a military spokesman, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, said. ”We have very sketchy information about how many died there and the extent of the devastation. We’re having extraordinary problems communicating there.”
The disaster has left more than 32 000 dead in Indonesia. Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra, closest to the quake epicentre, found 3 400 bodies in a single town, Meulaboh.
Sri Lanka
On the south coast of Sri Lanka, which has reported 22 000 dead and around 1,5-million homeless, observers said there was still no sign of government aid where whole fishing villages had been wiped out.
”There is frighteningly little [aid] here,” Chris Weeks, a director with the private Disaster Resource Network (DRN), in the capital, Colombo, said. ”There seems to be a lot of people who have turned up, but not much in the way of tents and blankets and medical equipment.”
Israel cancelled plans to send a 150-member team to aid in recovery efforts due to opposition from the Asian country, Israeli officials said. The medical delegation – including 60 soldiers – had been set to leave yesterday, but Sri Lanka protested at the military composition of the relief team, Israeli security officials said.
Meanwhile, the Tamil Tiger rebels complained that aid was not reaching areas under their control, and have appealed separately for international assistance. The government insists that aid is being distributed fairly.
Thailand
While the official death toll stood at 1 657, police said that more than 1 500 bodies had been found in one district alone – the home to the hardest-hit Khao Lak resort area – and that the total death toll there could reach 3 000. The government said 4 086 Thais and foreigners were missing. This included around 1 500 Swedes, 200 Finns, 200 Danes and hundreds of Norwegians, according to reports from Scandinavian capitals.
India
An estimated 7 000 people have been confirmed or presumed killed in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. – Guardian Unlimited Â