OT: India Cyclone Relief Ends

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Remember, its only going to be a 3 day winter storm or is it??LINK Just how long will governments anywhere be able to helps its own citizens if y2k turns out to be anything different than BITR.

Government relief has ended for millions of people left hungry, homeless and cold after one of the most powerful cyclones on record hit eastern India three weeks ago, a senior official said Wednesday.

"The government made it clear right at the outset that the relief would continue for 15 days only from the day it starts in a particular area," said D.N. Padhi, the relief commissioner for the state of Orissa.

Workers stopped distributing free rice last week in the district of Jagatsinghpur, where most of the 9,813 recorded deaths took place.

Relief workers on Thursday handed out the last 2-pound packets of rice, the weekly ration for an adult. Children received half that amount.

India says nearly 10,000 people are known dead from the cyclone.

Bodies are still being found, funeral pyres still being lit and there are still 400 villages rescuers can't reach, CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen reports. It is one of the poorest parts of India -- an area that could weather the devastation the least -- but nature showed no mercy, even now.

In hundreds of other villages there are ripped apart homes, ripped apart lives. Deepa Beara's baby boy was born the day the cyclone hit -- the day her fisherman husband drowned.

"We have to start building everything in their life, because what can she do? In a country, in a culture like this she cannot remarry anybody," Dr. K.A. Paul said about Deepa.

Paul is an American-based evangelist whose Global Peace Initiative is among the private agencies trying to help.

"They need water, they need food, they need clothes. They need shelter, they need reconstruction of their farms and their families and their future," Paul said.

What food is getting in is a mere Band-Aid. Many survivors are still only eating one meal a day.

And with fields flooded by salt water, crops are ruined.

Medical care is scarce, fueling concerns about an epidemic caused by water polluted with the carcasses of dead animals.

"Sanitation is very bad. The water supply is very bad," said Paul.

With aid painfully slow in coming, people here feel theirs is a forgotten disaster. There are so many here who need help -- what they don't understand is why so few are giving it.

"We will just have to starve," said Nityananda Das, who lives in Ersama village in Jagatsinghpur. "My livelihood is gone. My crops have been destroyed. There is no government work to be done so that I can earn something."

The government said it had restored electricity, phone lines and roads to all places. But villagers disputed that. "It's all tall claims," Das said.

The cyclone, which packed winds of 155 mph, blew away the thatched roofs of millions of huts, damaged concrete buildings, uprooted trees and laid waste much of coastal Orissa.

Villagers said they don't have the plastic sheets that could serve as a roof for their mud huts.

Padhi said the government has been trying to buy plastic sheets, but there was a shortage in the market. He said UNICEF had promised 10 million yards of sheeting, but delivered only 2 million.

UNICEF officials denied the organization made any such commitment. The U.N. organization said it would like to help, but it also could not find sheets on the market.

The government promised to distribute 2.5 million blankets -- one per family of six or seven members. It ordered 2 million and asked for donations for the rest.

"One blanket will not be enough for a family of many people," Padhi said. "But that is the government decision."

So far, the government has purchased only 800,000 blankets. But local officials have kept them in storage instead of handing them out, saying they feared riots would break out if they gave blankets only to some people. They said they were waiting for a full complement of supplies.

Camped out in the open for days, many people have come down with colds and fevers.

"But when we go to the hospital, the doctors give us only medicine for diarrhea," said Bikas Gherai, a resident of Batiagarh village in nearby Kendrapara district. "They say that's all they have."

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), November 25, 1999

Answers

Yeah, now imagine your in a disaster area like this, and your the only one out thousands that has food, water, blankets, etc. You'd think stories like this would kill the fallacy that a person could safely ride out an InfoMagic like scenario in suburbia or Hicksville but it hasn't.

-- Ocotillo (peeling@out.===), November 25, 1999.

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