The hungry scavenged for food and water and the wounded flooded hospitals in Indonesia’s Aceh yesterday, as a global relief effort staggered to help survivors of the tsunami catastrophe. US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who took a helicopter tour over Aceh’s ruined provincial capital, said he has never seen anything like it.

“I have been in war and I have been through a number of hurricanes, tornados and other relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this,” he told reporters afterward.

Flying over Banda Aceh and seeing how the wave came ashore pushing everything in its path — cars, ships, freighter overturned — all the way up to the foothills and then starting up the foothils until finally the waves came to a stop.

“I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave,” the former general said.

He said he had a better understanding of the needs of Aceh in the weeks and months ahead and will report back to US President George W. Bush wants on the devastation and on what more the United States can do to help.

“My children are gone, my grandchildren are gone,” said Hawal, a 60-year-old woman picking over the debris of a destroyed shoe shop with her older brother and a boy. “I have no clothes,” she said, choking back tears and holding a white headscarf to her mouth against the stench of rotting corpses buried in the rubble.

As supplies stacked up at Banda Aceh’s airport, U.S. Seahawk choppers flew out with aid for outlying areas and returned with the injured.

Tent villages, flying the flags of dozens of nations providing aid from South Africa to China, have sprouted up at the airport, a vivid illustration of what Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called the “global unity” in the biggest humanitarian aid effort since World War Two.

Seahawk wing commander Capt. Larry Burt said aid drops were getting more efficient and 30 were planned for yesterday. “We circle around trying to find the refugees. They will get out (from shelters) and wave us down,” he said, adding Indonesian soldiers were needed to control the crowds. “If not, the helos are getting mobbed. And the ones who are getting the food, are they the ones who need it? Because the strongest get it first.”

Fifteen injured survivors, including children with severe burns, lay on stretchers at the airport, preparing to be evacuated to the Sumatran city of Medan on an Australian Hercules transport plane.

<B>Waiting for food </B>

Hundreds of people lined up for food on Wednesday at an aid distribution centre in Banda Aceh, much of which lies in ruins. Nothing had arrived by Wednesday morning and no officials were around to explain. “We heard there would be rice here today,” said Baruna, 40, among a crowd of people surging toward a foreign reporter beseeching him for any scrap of information about where to find food.

“That’s why we are waiting. My family is hungry. There are 15 of us in the house.” Survivors are staggering into Banda Aceh and other areas of Aceh province with horrific wounds from the force of the tsunami that smashed cars into upper storeys of buildings, flipped ships onto beaches and made towns look like war zones. Nearly 500,000 Indonesians have been displaced by the catastrophe, many of them injured. More than 94,000 people were killed, almost all of them in Aceh — a province of about four million that has been beset by a three-decade-old civil war. Commercial activity is almost non-existent.

Few shops are open and desperate residents said there is nothing to buy even if banks were open to withdraw cash. Incongruously, a barber shop managed to open and was doing a brisk business. At a military hospital in Banda Aceh, about 200 patients injured in the disaster were packed 20 to a room, some on beds, others on army cots or on stretchers on the floor. Flies buzzed around and volunteers handed out clothes.

Neurosurgeon Edison Sitorus, the doctor in charge, said limb infections were common and he has had to do a number of amputations. “Some of those patients died,” he said.

Sitorus said the hospital had enough doctors, including some from Australia and Malaysia, but he needed more nurses and cleaning staff, and food supplies were irregular. “A real problem is many patients can’t go home. They have no home, no relatives.”

His biggest fear was malaria. The wounded, homeless and weakened were ideal breeding conditions for malaria, which was already bad in Aceh before the disaster.

Aid efforts were also focused on the coastal town of Meulaboh, 175 km (109 miles) to the southwest and just 150 km (93 miles) from the epicentre of the Dec. 26 quake. UN officials estimate one-third of the 120,000 people in the town were killed.

“The hospitals are overflowing,” said Australian Air Force Wing Commander Bill Griggs. “We are trying to get them organised, but more (injured) people keep coming from down the coast.”

<B>Dean Yates</B>