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31 December 2004

U.S., International Tsunami Relief Efforts Move Into High Gear

"Force is growing, coalition is growing," official says

Both the magnitude of aid to the tsunami-stricken nations bordering the Indian Ocean and the number of countries taking part in the humanitarian effort are expanding swiftly even as the disaster assessment phase continues, a U.S. military officer involved in the operation says.

“The forces are now mustering, and we’re determining how best to use them,” Navy Captain Rodger Welch, head of the Joint Inter-Agency Coordination Group, said during a December 31 briefing from the U.S. Pacific Command’s headquarters in Hawaii.

Welch reported that the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group now has arrived in the Strait of Malacca, linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and was preparing December 31 to begin helicopter operations into Indonesia.

A key objective of those helicopter flights will be to move supplies from airfields where they are already stored to the areas where they are most needed, at the same time freeing up space for more supplies to be brought in.  “In a lot of places there are supplies stacked up and they’re only awaiting a way to move them into the impacted areas, whether it be helicopters or trucks,” he said.

And even as the helicopters are deployed to bring supplies into the areas of greatest need, they can ferry the injured from those areas back to hospital facilities and doctors on their return trips, Welch noted.

Ten C-130 aircraft are already flying supplies into the hardest-hit areas, “focusing first on water, shelter, food and medicine.”  More C-130s -- medium-size aircraft that can land on, and take off from short fields –are on the way, along with an array of other assets, he said.

Addressing the breadth of the relief effort, Welch said that Canada had joined, on December 31, what he termed the “core group” of countries involved in the operations: the United States, India, Japan and Australia.  “And we expect that there will be more coordination countries in time.  The force is growing, the coalition is growing.”

Welch reported that some 9,000 U.S. military personnel already are on ships in the area -- with many more en route -- and about 350 are on the ground, including many manning disaster relief assessment teams in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

In the entire relief effort, Welch noted, “We are working to support the host nations, and we are doing so through their existing architectures in their countries.”

The military’s involvement is part of an overall U.S. effort headed by the Department of State, in coordination with its embassies in the region, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)