/ 17 January 2005

Somali tsunami death toll climbs to 176

The toll of people killed in Somalia when a deadly tsunami tidal wave struck the Horn of Africa country’s Indian Ocean coast on December 26 has climbed to 176, a presidential spokesperson said on Saturday.

”Some 142 were killed by direct hit on the ground while 34 drowned in the sea when their vessel capsized,” Yusuf Ismail Baribari, a spokesperson for Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, told a press conference in Nairobi.

”The 142 people died in the Somali shorelines when their fishing villages were hit by the waves,” he added.

On Thursday, Somali authorities said at least 132 people had died and up to 50 000 people were in urgent need of relief assistance.

The quake-powered waves — its epicentre was off the Indonesian island of Sumatra — have killed more than than 125 000 victims across the Indian Ocean since Sunday, spreading carnage across the shorelines of several Asian nations where diseases threaten to wipe out weakened survivors.

Baribari said cases of acute diarrhoea were being reported among communities along the Somali devastated shoreline.

”There is a possibility of an outbreak of cholera from the diarrhoea,” he added.

UN agencies appealed on Friday for immediate assistance to communities on the Somali coast.

”We need to act now and mobilise the needed resources,” Wafaa El Fadil, a humanitarian affairs officer with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who was in a UN assessment team that flew over some of the affected areas on Thursday, told a news conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

She said the team had seen ”considerable damage to structures” in the Hafun peninsula, one of the worst affected areas on the Somali coastline. The aerial mission had also seen some damage to structures in Bender Beyla, she added.

El-Balla Hagona, the UN Development Programme’s director for Somalia, said

that unlike other affected countries in Asia, Somalia lacked the ”indigenous capacity to assess the damage” caused by the tsunami.

”That has placed that responsibility on the UN and its collaborators,” Hagona said.

The remoteness of the affected areas was making efforts to assess the damage and estimate the number of affected people difficult.

”The aerial survey has not provided a complete assessment,” Balla said.

El Fadil described the affected areas as ”remote and harsh”. ”Accessibility is an issue,” she said, adding that it had not been possible to assess the effects of the tsunami on the livelihoods of Somali coastal communities yet.

Thomas Thompson, a logistics officer with the World Food Programme (WFP), who was also on the aerial assessment team, told the news conference that the tsunami had compounded the effects of a four-year drought that had already ravaged northern Somalia.

”There is need for us to act immediately,” he added.

WFP has started food distributions in Hafun. The agency used two all-terrain trucks on Wednesday to transport the first 12 mt of food from Foar, where regular WFP lorries got stuck. The 60 km trip from Foar to Hafun took the four-wheel-drive vehicles seven hours through mud and water because the tsunami damaged the only road, the UN said in an update.

The newly created Somali government and authorities in the self-declared, autonomous northeastern region of Puntland appealed for international relief assistance on Tuesday.

There were reports of more displaced people in Bander Beyla, Baargaal and Eyl, according to OCHA, which was coordinating efforts to assist those affected. It said the most urgent needs included food, medicine, shelter materials, cooking utensils and clothes.

Sunday’s tsunami waves also slammed into Tanzania, where at least 10 people, mostly children, died, police in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, said.

In Kenya, authorities sealed off the beaches on Monday to prevent people from exposing themselves to the danger posed by the rushing waters.

Sources said three people died, but police confirmed one. The beaches were

later reopened.

Damaged infrastructure was also reported in the Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles and Madagascar.

The tsunami, caused by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, hit coastal areas in the archipelago, as well as in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, The Maldives, Malaysia and Myanmar, leaving a trail of death and destruction. – Irin, Sapa, AFP