New cyclone forming in Burma area

May 14 2008 Media Wales

The United Nations said today another cyclone was forming near Burma, less than two weeks after it was devastated by a killer storm.

Amanda Pitt, spokeswoman for the UN humanitarian relief programme, could not say where the landfall would be or when it would become a full-fledged cyclone.

She told reporters that another cyclone was likely, saying: “This is terrible.”

She said the information about the possible cyclone came from the Joint Typhoon Warning centre, which is part of the UN’s World Meteorological Centre.

The May 2-3 cyclone that pulverised Burma’s Irrawaddy delta left more than 60,000 people dead or missing.

Military helicopters dropped food and medicine to survivors who remained cut off today in remote mountain villages.

The scale of devastation became clearer as more rescuers walked into the hardest-hit areas of central Sichuan province, finding towns where 80% of the population fell victim to Monday’s magnitude 7.9 quake.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted government officials as saying rescuers who this morning hiked into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county – the quake’s epicentre – found it “much worse than expected”. Of the town’s population of about 10,000, only 2,300 survived, and 1,000 of them were badly hurt.

The survivors there “desperately needed medical help, food and water”, Xinhua said.

The 7,700 dead in Yingxiu were believed to be in addition to the previously reported death toll of more than 12,000.

The toll was expected to rise further once rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan that remain cut off from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu more than two days after the quake.

Relief efforts were aided in their third day by the clearing of storms that had prevented flights over some of the worst-hit towns. Military helicopters seen flying north over Dujiangyan, and Xinhua said two of them airdropped food, drinking water and medicine to Yingxiu.

Survivors mourned the dead. East of the epicentre in the town of Hanwang, the smell of incense hung over a crowd of sobbing relatives who walked among some 60 bodies wrapped in plastic, some covered with tributes of branches or flowers.

Nearby, rescuers in blue uniforms carried more bodies out of a makeshift morgue at the Dongqi sports arena. The dead appeared to have come from heavily damaged apartments and a school behind the arena, where people stood in stunned shock.

Residents complained that delays in aid had caused more deaths in the immediate aftermath of the quake.

Zhang Chuanlin, a 27-year-old factory worker, said his 52-year-old mother was trapped while watching television with her friend. No rescue workers were around so he started to dig by himself.

“No one was helping me and then two strangers came and dug through the rubble. They found her an hour later,” he said.

“When they pulled her out I couldn’t look, I just couldn’t look when they pulled her out.”

A man who gave only his surname Li said he had suffered a double tragedy. His wife was killed while watching TV with Zhang’s mother and his daughter died when her school collapsed.

The child did not die right away and could be heard saying, “Please help me daddy, please rescue me”, right after the earthquake, he said, but there were no authorities to save her.

In Dujiangyan, a mother pleaded with police for information about her husband who was working in Wenchuan, blocking one of the few roads leading to the epicentre.

“I’ve begged and begged them to help me look for my husband,” Li Zhenhua said, showing her husband’s ID card to a crowd of onlookers. “I can’t go by myself because I’ve got a little baby and elderly parents here, so I can’t leave.”

“The government is doing nothing for us. The government won’t help us,” she said, over and over.

Premier Wen Jiabao visited a school today in Beichuan where two classroom buildings collapsed in the earthquake, including a school with 2,000 students that state TV said sustained “heavy casualties”.

“The party and the government are concerned about you. Your pain is our pain,” Mr Wen told survivors in Red Cross tents, his arms around two little girls and a woman, in footage aired on CCTV.

Some signs of normalcy returned. In Chengdu, some schools resumed classes, Xinhua reported.

The government’s high-gear response aimed to reassure Chinese while showing the world it was capable of handling the disaster and was ready for the August 8-24 Olympics in Beijing.

Today’s leg of the Olympic torch relay in the south-eastern city of Ruijin began with a minute of silence.