Burma cyclone tragedy

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Data Center of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
The city of Yangôn (also called Rangoon) in Burma (Myanmar), is tucked into a "V" between two rivers that empty into the Gulf of Martaban through a large estuary. When Cyclone Nargis passed over the city in the first week of May 2008, the entire coastal plain flooded, surrounding Yangôn with water.
This pair of images from NASA's Landsat satellite shows the city and surrounding agricultural land before and after the storm. On March 18, 2008, the built up part of the city and its suburbs appear bluish purple, fallow cropland is pinkish-tan, and vegetation is dark green. The wide rivers are a muddy green.
After Nargis inundated the area with heavy rains and storm surge, standing water covered almost the entire area. As of May 5, flooding in the heart of the city appeared to be less than in the surrounding areas. (Flooding probably exists, but it may be at a smaller scale than Landsat is able to detect.) However, all the land to the west and southwest and most of the area to the east and southeast are still submerged. Across the river to the southeast of the city, a swath of relatively dry land—perhaps higher in elevation, or protected by a levee—extends toward the lower right corner of the image. Across the rest of the scene, standing water varies in shades from muddy brown, to green, to purplish blue.
12 May 2008 15:26:40 GMT
Source: Reuters By Darren Schuettler
BANGKOK, May 12 (Reuters) - The ships, aircraft, money and people are slowly getting into place for a 'tsunami-style' international aid operation for cyclone-ravaged Myanmar. Now all they need is government permission.While aid trickles into the former Burma 10 days after Cyclone Nargis, relief agencies say the storm's 1.5 million survivors in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy delta are getting only a fraction of the food, water and medicines they need.The World Food Programme (WFP) said it only had 10 percent of the staff and equipment it needed inside the army-ruled country."We think we need to be moving 375 tonnes of food a day down into the affected areas. We are doing less than 20 percent of that," WFP spokesman Marcus Prior told a news conference.The agency, which is flying food aid into the former capital Yangon and using local staff to distribute it, was "essentially operating by remote control", he said."It puts enormous pressure on the staff that we do have in the field. Although it is do-able, it's not sustainable and it's not do-able on the scale that is necessary," Prior said.
The military, which has ruled for 46 years, has welcomed "aid from any nation" but has made it very clear it does not want an influx of foreign experts or equipment distributing it.The reclusive regime is not granting visas for foreign logistics teams needed to ramp up the relief effort and avoid a second wave of deaths due to hunger and disease."Aid is being delivered daily by boat, helicopters and trucks," Soe Tha, Minister for National Planning and Economic Development, told foreign diplomats in Yangon on Sunday.Seven military helicopters are running an air bridge from Yangon west to Pathein, a staging area for the government relief effort. The regime is also using small boats and two larger ships to deliver aid, U.N. officials say.Myanmar's air force has 66 helicopters, ranging from French-made Alouettes and U.S.-built Bells to Russian Mi-17s, and more than a dozen fixed-wing transport planes, experts say. Little is known about their airworthiness or maintenance.
The United Nations has called for nearly $50 million in logistical support as part of a wider appeal for $187 million in aid for Myanmar."We need air assets, boat and road transportation made available, as well as warehousing. We need a tracking system and the staff to run this operation," Terje Skavdal, head of the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, told reporters.In past disasters, they were up and running in 3-4 days."The fact that we are on day 10 now shows how delayed we are in the response," he said.
Nargis is Asia's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami, which triggered a massive international relief effort which involved Australia, U.S. and EU.Five days after the killer waves struck Indonesia, where more than half of the 230,000 tsunami victims died, helicopters began ferrying aid from the clogged airport at Banda Aceh.
The aircraft from many nations formed the backbone of supply lines to remote villages and helped stave off a second wave of deaths.