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| Southeast Asia |
| UN disaster chief compares Asia tsunami to Tangshan earthquake |
| 2005-01-05 |
| The chief UN disaster coordinator Jan Egeland compared the human toll from the Asian tsunami disaster to the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1976. The so-called Great Tangshan Earthquake on July 28, 1976 was one of the worst natural disasters of all time with an official toll of more than 240,000 dead, though some estimates put the toll at twice that number. Egeland made the comparison as he described the difficulty of getting an accurate toll for the tsunami disaster on December 26 for which nearly 146,000 are known to have died so far, mainly in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. "We're waiting for the Indonesian authorities to really try to estimate what is the real toll on the Sumatra and Aceh coast," he said. Egeland told a press conference it would be more difficult in Indonesia, which was near the epicentre of the strongest quake recorded in 40 years, than for Sri Lanka or Thailand. "Whole coastal lines have been washed away, with everything including the villages and the villagers," Egland said. "I do not foresee even in the next few days us having a very accurate figure," he added. Like China's 1976 Tangshan earthquake, Egeland believes the toll "will be very very high here as well." As for people displaced by the disaster, "we're saying that altogether there are much more than one million people displaced," Egeland said. "The figure of around five million people we have to assist in one form or another, I think is a fairly accurate figure," he added. |
| Posted by:tipper |