1 Million in India Still Stranded by Cyclone Flooding

More than a million people remained marooned Tuesday in the villages of India’s ravaged eastern coast, victims of a massive cyclone that tore through this impoverished region and overwhelmed the government’s attempts to provide relief.

Survivors clung to the tops of coconut trees. Bodies clogged waterways. Herds of cattle lay dead in filthy water. Hungry people stormed food convoys, while the army launched a spirited but inadequate campaign to airdrop supplies to villagers crowded on the small islands of solid ground that dot the miles of flooded plains.

Four days after the cyclone rode in from the Bay of Bengal, Indian officials said they had failed to reach the overwhelming majority of the 15,000 villages submerged or surrounded by the floods, high tides and rains. At least 30,000 people were feared trapped inside cyclone shelters, buildings perched on stilts that have so far proved beyond the reach of aid officials.

“I feel so sorry for the people--we have not been able to reach them,” said D. N. Padhi, who is leading the relief effort. “We have not been able to get through.”

Estimates of the number of people killed in the storm continued to vary widely, with most officials predicting that the body count will top 5,000.

Indeed, grisly dispatches trickled in to Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa state, all day long: A reporter for Star News Television who made it to the nearly submerged port city of Paradwip said that 400 bodies had been cremated Monday and Tuesday. United News of India reported 300 deaths in the city of Cuttack. A man who had swum and walked more than 10 miles from a coastal village told Red Cross officials that he had passed floating bodies all along the way.

Relief officials said they had managed only 30 airdrops along the 120-mile stretch of coastline devastated by the cyclone. Relief convoys were rare anywhere along the main highways, and people who got through to the disaster zone reported being mobbed by survivors searching for food.

“We don’t know very much. The information is sketchy--this is a natural disaster,” a bewildered Giridhar Gamang, the chief minister of Orissa, said as he sat in his darkened office searching for a telephone that would work. “We are still assessing the situation.”

The cyclone triggered 20-foot-high waves and spun off 120-mph winds. The mud huts that make up the hamlets here never stood a chance, and many villages were swept away. The storm severed nearly all communications, submerging roads, downing power lines and covering huge stretches of land with water.

Orissa has been pounded by cyclones before: Twenty-two have hit the state in the past 176 years, with the most deadly pummeling Paradwip in 1971, killing nearly 10,000 people. Officials said last week’s storm was probably the most powerful, although they won’t know for some time whether it was as deadly as the one 28 years ago.

With the initial shock of the storm over, tens of thousands of people lined the roads Tuesday waiting for helicopters and trucks to bring food and water. Some said they had already been forced to drink the water they stood in, a practice that relief officials said could bring about widespread illness.

There were reports of looting, of people fighting over food and of villagers stealing pails and filling them with water from drains to drink. In Paradwip, mobs reportedly broke into military warehouses and the homes of local officials.

In Shantrapur, a hamlet on the highway to the coast, villagers gathered around a lone candle and wondered where they could find something to eat. By early evening, no aid of any sort had reached them. All but nine of the village’s 70 homes were destroyed, and all 40 of its cattle had drowned. Only one villager died--a man swept away in a rushing wall of water.

“All I had was a little shack, and then the storm came and now it’s gone,” said Narasimya Sahn, a shirtless 35-year-old laborer who had spent his last rupees on a plate of rice for his 5-year-old daughter. “I have nothing.”

In Uttarasason, about a mile away, the situation seemed just as grim.

There, the storm killed five people, wiped out 375 homes, flooded the fields and drowned the cattle. A group of men huddled under a storefront, one of the few structures still standing, and debated their next move. The men said that a relief convoy had started their way earlier in the day but that it had been looted before it arrived.

“I’m not expecting anything,” said Satyabati Sahu, a 45-year-old shopkeeper. “I had some food, whatever little bits I could save, but everything now is gone.”

Officials blamed their slow response to the disaster on the fact that the cyclone had hovered for nearly 24 hours over Bhubaneswar.

“We couldn’t even see each other’s faces,” said Padhi, the relief official. “We were just paralyzed.”

With so many people stranded for so long, relief officials said their biggest concern is that survivors could become dehydrated or even starve, particularly the elderly and ill. The officials said the Indian army doesn’t appear to have the capacity to airdrop the amount of supplies needed to feed so many people.

One official with the International Committee of the Red Cross said he was encouraged by reports of people in flooded areas clinging to coconut trees, whose fruit and milk often have kept cyclone survivors alive for days.

“The coconut is the lifesaver,” said Julian Francis, a Red Cross worker. “Trees you can cling to, the meat you can eat, and you can get the water from inside.”

Still, Francis said, coconut trees will not be enough to save the thousands who are stranded.

“If food doesn’t get out to these villages in the next couple of days,” he said, “it is going to get extremely difficult.”