Aid workers awed by disaster

BEIJING — The first foreign-aid workers allowed to meet survivors of last week’s North Korean rail disaster in the hospital yesterday found wards full of children, their bodies blackened and twisted by the explosion.

“We saw people, five people, who were completely burned, their faces almost ripped off,” said Richard Ragan, a World Food Program official in Pyongyang. “They were all children.

“We saw a small child, probably 7 or 8 years old. He was in a coma. His parents were totally distraught. They didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t responding to them.”

Mr. Ragan said he had expected the sound of moaning and screaming victims. “The strange thing was, the hospital was very quiet — the patients were really silent,” he said.

He was, however, still shocked. “I have seen some bad stuff in 20 years of doing this sort of thing, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything this bad.”

Aid slowly began to reach the crippled town of Ryongchon over the weekend. Local Red Cross workers were able to get limited supplies in quickly after Thursday’s explosion, which killed at least 161 and injured 1,300 others, 370 seriously.

At least 76 of the dead were children from two schools near the blast site — a primary school that had just finished morning lessons at the time of the accident and an agricultural school for secondary pupils.

Three days passed, however, before the Chinese were allowed to send 11 trucks carrying instant noodles, blankets, canned food and tents across the river dividing the countries.

Aid workers say the first priority is to get medical supplies to the seriously injured, given the desperate state of the North Korean health system after years of isolation, economic collapse and power shortages.

Some of the seriously injured, who were taken to the nearby town of Sinuiju, are not expected to survive.

“This was a hospital clearly in need of supplies,” Mr. Ragan said. “It was one of the most tragic things I have ever seen. A lot [of the patients] didn’t really appear to be on drips or to be receiving any kind of medication.

“The doctors, quite frankly, were doing heroic work. They stabilized all these victims with what would appear to be very little medical supplies, very rudimentary facilities. There clearly wasn’t enough room. There were two children lying on filing cabinets, two children in the same bed. Some of the beds were even propped up on stones.”

Mr. Ragan also visited Ryongchon. He said nothing he saw or was told made him doubt the official version of the accident: Due to “carelessness,” a railway car carrying ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer used in explosives, shunted into an oil tanker, bringing down a live power cable.

Kim Jong-il, the country’s Stalinist dictator, had traveled through the station nine hours before and there was some speculation in South Korea that it might have been an assassination attempt.

The invitation to foreign-aid workers to visit the scene so soon after the disaster was an unprecedented example of openness in the country. They found a scene described by one as “obliteration,” with two huge craters amid the wreckage of buildings.

Chinese aid workers, however, were baffled that they were not allowed either to receive patients at Chinese hospitals or send staff into the country.

Red Cross aid has to come from distant parts of North Korea, where a short journey can take days on bad roads. Yet Dandong, which has at least four major hospitals equipped to help, is 10 miles away.