Aceh's Water Supply Poisoned By Corpses As Recovery Efforts Stumble

[hatrack]

""The road to Krueng Raya is paved with death and devastation, and no one in authority appears to care. A week after an earthquake and tidal waves laid waste to Indonesia's remote Aceh province, bodies still rot into the earth and poison the water supply. Mountains of rubble - all that remains of communities wiped out in five minutes last Sunday - have yet to be cleared.

Emergency supplies, meanwhile, are stacked up in a hangar at the military airfield in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, while the homeless go hungry and the sick beg for medicines. A strange air of inactivity pervades Aceh, located in the far north-west of the Indonesian archipelago, near the epicentre of the earthquake that triggered the tsunamis across the region. After a catastrophe that killed at least 80,000 people in the province and created tens of thousands of refugees, you would expect volunteers and equipment to be pouring in from all corners of a country of 200 million people and a large army and police force.

But in Krueng Raya, a once pretty fishing village, locals have been left to excavate bodies from the ruins of their homes, with the help of one mechanical digger. "We need 10," says Jabar bin Yasim, the village head. More than half of the town's 7,000 inhabitants lost their lives in the disaster, which flattened Krueng Raya. Survivors are living in three crowded refugee camps, existing on the meagre hand-outs that have reached them in recent days. "This is our daily ration," says Norkyalis bin Ibrahim, angrily shaking a blue plastic mug filled with rice. "I'm hungry. The children have no milk. We are short of clean water and medicines. We are using petrol to treat infected wounds.''

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=597275

[pnutchuck]

1. Rotting corpses pose little to no threat to fresh water supplies

snip

Dead bodies are not a disease threat, scientists say.

The germs that cause the feared waterborne diseases die with their host, or within hours afterward. Cholera can survive a while, but most of the tsunami victims did not have cholera when they died, so their bodies would not be a health threat.

Medical experts say there are no disease-causing byproducts from the decomposition of human flesh.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6765193/

[rfkrfk]

2. local officials need to be compensated

if this stuff is moved through their territory.
The UN, should know about this.