to nearly 22,500
Reuters/bdnews24.com .
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Of the dead, only 671 were in the former capital, Yangon, and its outlying districts, state radio said, confirming Nargis as the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in
Meanwhile, Save the Children said it expected the death toll from
The aid agency’s Bangkok-based spokesman Dan Collinson said the rapidly escalating death toll would rise sharply again in the next few days as victims of Saturday’s powerful cyclone were located.
‘More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,’ the minister for relief and resettlement, Maung Maung Swe, told a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of five million, where food and water supplies are running low.
‘The wave was up to 12 feet high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages,’ he said, giving the first detailed description of the weekend cyclone. ‘They did not have anywhere to flee.’
The information minister, Kyaw Hsan, said the military were ‘doing their best’, but analysts said there could be political fallout for the former
‘The myth they have projected about being well-prepared has been totally blown away,’ said political analyst Aung Naing Oo, who fled to
Earlier, the foreign minister, Nyan Win, said on state television 10,000 people had died just in Bogalay, a town 50 miles southwest of
Reflecting the scale of the disaster, the junta said it would postpone to May 24 a constitutional referendum in the worst-hit areas of
The government lifted states of emergency in three of the five states declared official disaster zones and some parts of the worst-hit Yangon and
The information minister also said the government had sufficient stocks of rice despite damage to grain stored in the huge delta, known as the ‘rice bowl of Asia’ 50 years ago when Burma was the world’s largest rice exporter.
The total left homeless by the 120 miles per hour winds and storm surge is in the several hundred thousands, United Nations aid officials say.
Even in delta villages that managed to withstand the worst of the winds, food and water is already running low.
‘There’s not much food,’ one woman at a pineapple stall in Hlaing Tha Yar, a village one hour’s drive west of
Residents of
Prices of food, fuel and construction materials have skyrocketed, and most shops have sold out of candles and batteries. An egg costs three times what it did on Friday.
‘Generators are selling very well under the generals,’ said one man waiting outside a shop.
The disaster drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004
Bernard Delpuech, a European Union aid official in
Army-controlled media have made much of the military’s response, showing footage of soldiers manhandling tree trunks or top generals climbing into helicopters or greeting homeless storm victims in Buddhist temples.
Aid agency World Vision in
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