Rivers 'still strewn with bodies'
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (CNN) -- A massive relief effort is underway to remove corpses in the Indonesian province of Aceh but rivers are still strewn with bodies more than a week after the tsunami disaster, CNN Senior Asian Correspondent Mike Chinoy reported.
Chinoy talked Monday morning (GMT) with CNN Anchor Charles Hodson about developments in Aceh.
CHINOY: Relief is coming in but getting it to the people most in need is not easy because the scale of the devastation is so immense.
In the center of Aceh -- the downtown, bustling commercial center of Aceh -- you can see that the force of the tsunami threw scores of boats up onto a bridge up and onto the other side.
You can see smoke from people burning garbage and debris.
The building in front of it was the main market here in Banda Aceh and at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, it would have been packed with people, therefore you have to assume that the casualties in this area alone would have been immense.
Indonesian army crews have been going around retrieving bodies from the streets and from the water.
But just a few meters from where I am standing, down the road from here, there are hundreds more bodies in the water, sometimes whole families who died together.
This was a commercial and residential area. There were shops on the ground floor of these buildings and people actually lived above them.
I'm actually standing on the roof of the building that was brought down by the quake and, of course, one of the things that accentuated the damage was that so many buildings were destroyed or weakened by the quake so that when the tsunami came in, they were just crushed.
So an immense immense effort to try and stabilize things for enormous numbers of people here. And if things are bad here we can only imagine how much worse they would be in more remote areas of Aceh.
HODSON: At an official level, what is happening? What activities away from the scene of devastation, in front of which you're standing. Is aid coming in? What are officials doing? What efforts are being made to recover the hundreds of bodies just in the immediate area where you are?
CHINOY: Well, a big deal of Banda Aceh looks like this but amidst the rubble you do have a huge relief effort underway.
The Australians have set up a water purification system that's pumping out 20,000 liters of clean water an hour.
That's very important because the water supply for Banda Aceh came from these rivers and the rivers are contaminated because of all the corpses.
The US military announced today, joined by the Australian military, about helicopter missions from Banda Aceh airport to those remote regions on the western coast that have been cut off ever since the tsunami hit, bringing food, medicine and sometimes bringing medical teams.
One of the big problems is that there are so many different agencies -- the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, aid agencies from South East Asia.
They're all coming in but there's no infrastructure. There aren't enough cars, there aren't places to live, there aren't enough translators, so coordinating an extremely complex operation is really the key.
The money seems to be there, the supplies seem to be ready to move in but simply getting all these pieces of this hugely complex puzzle to work is the challenge, and of course it's a race against time because with each passing day that people don't get the help, the more people get sick and the more people die.
