BANGKOK — The first shipment of relief supplies was slated to arrive in Burma today, as the death toll from a tropical cyclone threatened to top 10,000 with millions of survivors scrounging for medical care, food and shelter.
Some huddled in Buddhist temples for safety, while the ruling military junta put aside the nation’s self-imposed isolation to appeal for foreign help after Burma’s deadliest storm on record.
Bare-chested, barefoot men desperately roped together bamboo poles, dry palm leaves, rattan mats and other materials to hurriedly repair damaged dwellings along the worst-hit south coast.
The British-built commercial port of Rangoon lost much of its electricity when howling winds toppled power lines, which paralyzed water pumps and other life-support systems, according to eyewitness reports and e-mailed photographs.
The government said yesterday that it feared more than 10,000 people had been killed, 30 times more than in earlier estimates. Reports said up to 2 million people were left homeless.
The world’s most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest in Rangoon. There was no immediate word on how the frail, 62-year-old Nobel Peace laureate was coping inside her lakeside house on the former capital’s University Avenue.
Rangoon, also known as Yangon, is home to about 6 million people, many of whom spent the day lifting collapsed roofs and other urban debris to clear paths through flooded streets from Saturday’s pounding by Cyclone Nargis.
Some streets had dried enough for traffic to resume yesterday.
“Even in our hotel, we couldn’t move, because of glass falling. We could see trees, which must have been standing 100 years, falling down,” a former Swedish government minister, Jens Orback, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
“For the first 10 to 12 hours there was no help from the authorities. There were no policemen and no military on the streets, but people were privately out there with their handsaws chopping the trees,” Mr. Orback said.
Residents spoke of widespread devastation along the coast, prompting price increases for food, transportation, corrugated metal sheets, nails and other basic items.
If initial estimates prove accurate, the death toll would be the highest from a natural disaster in Southeast Asia since the tsunami of December 2004, which killed 229,866 people as it devastated coastlines in Indonesia, Thailand and other parts of Southeast and South Asia.
In the wake of the tsunami, an extensive early warning system was established in the Pacific region.
But residents of Rangoon said they were angry that the government failed to adequately warn them of the approaching storm and had done little to alleviate their plight.
“The government misled people. They could have warned us about the severity of the coming cyclone so we could be better prepared,” Thin Thin, a grocery store owner, told the Associated Press.
Foreign Minister Nyan Win told Rangoon-based diplomats that the death toll could rise to more than 10,000 in the region, which sits barely above sea level, Asian diplomats said.
The diplomats said they were told Burma, also known as Myanmar, welcomed international humanitarian aid, including urgently needed roofing materials, medicine, water-purifying tablets and mosquito nets. The first 10-ton shipment was scheduled to arrive from Thailand today, according to an AP dispatch from the capital.
“There’s no electricity, very limited communications, water is lacking in many neighborhoods,” Shari Villarosa, U.S. charge d’affaires in Rangoon, told the BBC.
Densely populated, rural zones along the silt-rich Irrawaddy River delta just west of Rangoon were worst-hit by the cyclone as it clawed northward up the funnel-shaped Bay of Bengal — infamously known as “cyclone alley” because of the seasonal havoc cyclones inflict on Burma, Bangladesh and eastern India.
Outlying smaller towns and villages remained cut off yesterday, and officials feared a rapidly escalating death toll when relief crews begin trudging into rural areas today.
In Washington, first lady Laura Bush said the U.S. Embassy had authorized an emergency contribution of $250,000 to help with relief efforts and was prepared to provide more if the government allows a U.S. disaster assistance response team to enter the country to assess needs.
“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path,” Mrs. Bush said. “The response to this cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failures to meet its people’s basic needs.”
Pamela Sitko, communication relief manager for the Asia-Pacific region for the aid agency World Vision, said that it and other aid agencies were negotiating with the government to try to arrange airlifts of supplies.
“The biggest concern is communication because the electricity is down, running water has stopped, phone lines are down and it is difficult to assess the real needs because we can’t reach the outer-lying regions,” Ms. Sitko said.
In 2006, the military dictatorship moved the country’s political administration to Naypyitaw, more than 150 miles north of the coast, apparently to avoid any insurrections by pro-democracy dissidents and to geographically centralize its grip on rebellious outlying border areas.
Aung Din, executive director of the Washington-based U.S. Campaign for Burma, said it was critical that aid not be delivered through the “notoriously corrupt government.”
“The military and the organizations run by the wives of the generals will only siphon off money and keep supplies for themselves. Money and humanitarian assistance should only be provided to trusted, international humanitarian organizations who can reach the victims of the cyclone directly,” he said.
Burma has repeatedly denounced the United Nations for interfering in the country’s politics, and has quarreled with the International Committee of the Red Cross over its request to interview inmates in Rangoon’s squalid prison.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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