[From the diaries by susanhu. See also tcharles123‘s diary yesterday on UNICEF.]
The UN is urgently calling on all nations to conduct a massive relief effort for the quake victims. Time is not on their side as winter sets in and the roads become impassable.
Write your congresspeople and demand the US (or Canada or the UK or FR or AU… where ever you are from) send choppers and transport planes and fucking marines, I don’t care, send these people help asap before they die.
“What we need is something like no other emergency relief effort,” Under-Secretary General Jan Egeland told reporters in Geneva, calling for the equivalent of the Berlin airlift that kept Berlin alive in the late 1940s after Soviet forces cut all land access.
“If they could do that in the end of the 1940s, set up in no time a lifeline to millions, we should be able to do that in 2005,” he added of the need to rush in hundreds of thousands of winterized tents, medicine, and food and other urgently needed supplies before the situation worsened even further with the arrival of the harsh Himalayan winter.
He said 48,000 people were now confirmed dead, but the figure could be twice as high. Perhaps worse was the proportionate number of wounded, with 67,000 people severely injured. If the UN assumed this figure would also be doubled or tripled, this meant tens of thousands could die in the coming days if they were not reached in time.
Half a million people had still not been reached and 3 million had been left with damaged homes. “We are putting in all our combined UN resources at the moment. It is not enough. We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was as worse as it could get. This is worse,” he said.
“The race against the clock is like no other one. There is like a terrible cut-off for us in the beginning of December, could be even before, when there will be massive snowfalls in the Himalayan mountains.”
