Once Vibrant City Shrouded By Silence

A man walks near a body in the debris from the tsunami that wrecked Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Emergency aid has not begun to approach the level needed. (Romeo Ranoco -- Reuters)

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Dec. 31 -- Ariya Street was dead quiet, a narrow road to devastation and despair.

"Hello? Hello?" The calls of Bu Di and his orange-jacketed rescue team pierced the silence, seeking any victims left behind. "Hello?" they shouted repeatedly. "Anyone home?"

The only answer was more silence. The crumbled houses of Ariya Street were empty, their families killed or scattered by a neck-high wall of water that unfurled over downtown Banda Aceh early Sunday. Like much of this wrecked city at the northern tip of Sumatra island, Ariya Street has been left for dead, even by its residents.

Five days after an undersea earthquake 160 miles south of here triggered a huge tsunami, Banda Aceh's little airport has begun to hum with the arrivals of C-130 Hercules transport planes bringing in relief supplies. But their numbers -- a half-dozen were seen on the ground Friday, including one U.S. plane and two from Australia -- seemed nowhere near commensurate with the sweep of the disaster in northern Sumatra.

This once vibrant city of 300,000, capital of Indonesia's Aceh province, suffered a blow from the tsunami that left people here stunned, seemingly unable to comprehend what had happened and unsure of what to do.

Stores were slowly starting to reopen on Friday, although many were destroyed and others still have their gates pulled shut. Residents were finding it easier to buy fruit and basic groceries. Cars and trucks lined up for hours waiting to buy scarce supplies of gasoline.

The Indonesian government has estimated that almost 80,000 people were killed in the country in Sunday's tsunami and half a million were injured or left homeless, most of them in Aceh province. Disease threatens to raise the toll, according to relief experts, unless shelter, clean water and medicine start flowing in greater volume to the people who need them.

"People are dying," said Fawzi Ali Amin, vice rector of Mohammediya University here, who has helped organize a group of students to do rescue work. The government uses "a bureaucratic system," he said. "People are dying and this is the way they are doing."

Amin said he went to government authorities for body bags and medicine to distribute among refugees from the flooding. What he got instead, he fumed, was a request to fill out forms. In addition, he said, a wealthy donor put a plane at the group's disposal to deliver supplies from the capital, Jakarta, but authorities said the airport at Aceh was too busy to grant landing permission.

"The government, their staff, they have a meeting," he said angrily in a conversation outside the provincial government headquarters. "They give a directive. We don't need a directive. We need to act. Action first, talk later."

Koji Ota, Japan's ambassador to Indonesia, who was speaking with Amin, volunteered to him that his government was prepared to donate body bags, as many as 1,500 of them.

"That's good," shouted Amin. "We need body bags. But we need them right away. We need them tomorrow."

Ota, who visited Banda Aceh on Friday along with Indonesia's vice president, Yusef Kalla, had to leave before the conversation with Amin could reach a conclusion, swept up in Kalla's departing clutch of officials and security guards. Amin, who has dispatched 80 students into the streets to help pick up corpses, was left standing at the entrance, still without his body bags.

Effendi Azhar, a veterinarian from Medan to the south, Sumatra's main city, also got an aid effort off the ground without government or international help. With fellow alumni of Medan University's veterinary department, he raised funds and gathered clothes and food. The first three truckloads arrived here Friday and were distributed to mosques caring for refugees.

"We did it all alone," Azhar said.

The acting Aceh provincial governor, Azwar Abubakar, said much of the problem getting relief efforts moving stemmed from the high death toll among provincial and lower-level officials in Banda Aceh and towns down the coast. "You have a meeting and make a decision, but then nothing happens," he said. "There is nobody there."

Indonesian soldiers and paramilitary police officers, wearing white rubber gloves, have fanned out across Banda Aceh to pick up the bodies. They moved in little groups Friday down T. Nyaic Arief Street, the city's main avenue, bagging the dead and loading the bodies like cordwood into the back of military trucks.

An excavator dug a wide ditch in a landfill beside the Aceh River, meanwhile, and pushed the black bags inside before covering them with gray silt. From a bridge nearby, teenage boys watched silently as the grim work proceeded. A restaurant 200 yards away advertised its planned New Year's Eve celebrations with a banner that said, in English, "Flashback to the Future -- 2004-2005."

Despite the military deployment, bloated corpses, their limbs akimbo and their skin gray with mud and silt, dotted the streets of Banda Aceh. Some were covered with cloth; others lay naked and swollen where the enormous wave had dropped them after surging up the Aceh River and covering a good part of the city.

Nearly a week later, the fury of the wave remained alive in its legacy of destruction. Cars sat atop other cars. Bicycles lay twisted and abandoned. Furniture stuck out from the silt. Some buildings had collapsed; others were gutted. In a whole swath of the city, none was habitable. Residents who remained were camped outside.

The people of Aceh mostly stood dispirited by the wreckage, unable to do much beside look at the extent of the disaster. Some started small fires, trying to burn the worst of the wreckage or heat water. No bulldozers were visible. Other people pulled at their belongings in an effort to extract them from the silt. Some just sat down.

The mud was everywhere. It clogged the streets, reducing broad avenues to narrow passageways. It covered debris, it covered dead bodies, it covered children's toys. One man walked calmly along the side of T. Nyaic Arief Street, sticking a white pole into the muck, like a beachcomber scanning for shells.

Nasserul, who lived just off Ariya Street, stood quietly with a few of his neighbors, burning debris in a courtyard. A black cat picked its way softly through the mud. Two roosters strutted nearby, silent and slow.

Then Di and the rescue team walked up. Someone had reported hearing the groans of an injured person nearby, Di told Nasserul, who like many Indonesians uses only one name. Di showed a handwritten map. The groans were coming from over there, according to the information we have, he said, pointing at the biggest house on Ariya Street.

That was the home of Mr. Zoel, a local government official, Nasserul said. But no one was inside, and no one replied to the rescuers' repeated shouting. After five minutes of futile cries, they retreated back through the rubble, walking on boards to avoid sinking into the mud.

Di's team members, about 35 in all, were dispatched by the government from Medan, so they did not know the neighborhood, or Mr. Zoel's place in it. But Nasserul, 30, remembered the Zoel house well. The ornate gate, he said, was where he and his younger brother and sister ended up Sunday, holding onto life, after being swept along for a block by the attacking waters.