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(Note: since this article was written the estimates of death in Indonesia have risen to 95,000)
Indonesia quake toll hits 21,000 as disease threatens
Jakarta Post - December 28, 2004
BANDA ACEH, Aceh (AFP): The rotting corpses of quake victims piled up Tuesday on Indonesia's Sumatra island where at least 21,000 were dead and more lives were threatened by the possibility of disease outbreaks.
There were apocalyptic scenes in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh where the stench of death hung over the rubble of demolished houses as survivors from Sunday's earthquake and tsunami struggled to dig graves in tropical heat.
From the obliterated western shoreline of Sumatra's Aceh province there was only eerie silence pierced by an SOS call from what remained of the main town where police said looting had broken out as starvation loomed.
Purnomo Sidik, the head of the disaster relief center at the ministry of social services, said on late Tuesday the toll had jumped four-fold to more than 21,000 as the dead were counted in Banda Aceh and the western town of Meulaboh.
With medicine, water, body bags, power and communications still in short supply, the threat of widespread sickness was growing while foreign aid agencies said it was near impossible to distribute relief to the area.
Aceh has been under military lockdown for over a year during a government drive to crush a separatist rebellion. A ban on foreign aid agencies has just been lifted, but with no network in place they faced a battle to get started.
In the first contact from the town of Meulaboh, which would have been among the first hit by the enormous tidal waves that wreaked devastation across Asia, an e-mail from local police said that only 20 percent of the town still stood.
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