ninme

Unlucky thirteen.

Times Online - Aid workers fear Burma cyclone deaths will top 50,000

Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Katrina, eat your heart out.

“We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless,” Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.

“I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.”

The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.

I wish he wouldn’t call it Myanmar. Fox News was calling it Myanmar. They go through the clunkiness of saying “homicide bombers” but they won’t call it Burma.

Okay, so, I get how 225,000 people died in the tsunami. They all got washed out to sea. I get how 1,500 people can die in Katrina, since it was a big-ass storm with flooding and things falling over and all the rest of it. I get how millions can be homeless after a storm. I don’t get how 50,000 people die in a storm. They have a slideshow “Pictures: Burmese Cyclone” but it’s just a bunch of people stepping over downed trees. After the tsunami there were pictures of bodies, everywhere, all over the beaches or stacked in piles awaiting delivery of body bags. So, yeah. It’s not computing.

Update:

Thank you Rush. Mostly drowning, 12-foot storm surge.

Update II:

Thank you, The Times:

Times Online - Burma cyclone: victims killed by 12ft tidal wave

Most of the victims of the Burma cyclone were overwhelmed by a 12ft moving wall of water that bore down on their lowlying villages at the mouth of the Irrawaddy river delta.

In a rare press conference, members of the Burmese junta today gave the most detailed description to date of the disaster that killed at least 22,000 people at the weekend, and left a further 41,000 missing, according to Burmese state radio.

“More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” said Maung Maung Swe, Burma’s Minister for Relief and Resettlement, at a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of Rangoon, where food and water supplies are running low.

“The wave was up to 12ft (3.5 metres) high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages. They did not have anywhere to flee.”

Or any warning, I bet. Junta hasn’t installed cable-TV access to Weather Channel Burma in every home, eh?

The Christian relief organisation World Vision, one of the few international agencies allowed to work inside Burma, said its teams had flown over the most affected regions and witnessed horrific scenes on the ground.

“They saw the dead bodies from the helicopters, so it’s quite overwhelming,” said Kyi Minn, a World Vision adviser based in Rangoon. …

Images from Burmese state television showed large trees and electricity poles sprawled across roads, and roofless houses ringed by water in the delta, once a lacework of paddy fields and canals regarded as Myanmar’s rice bowl. The salt water will have destroyed the rice fields for years to come.

Grand. Add that to the food shortages, bio-fuel subsidies, and rampaging rats.