"zanzibar" wrote ...
> Curiously speaking, how did the US arrived to 100,000 death figures when
they have not yet been allowed to enter Burma by the Burmese Junta.
As there were 22,000 dead and 40,000 missing re****ted by the junta, it's
hardly a stretch to infer 100,000 dead.
Recall that early re****ts of the great tsunami death counts were a mere
fraction of the final total?
Well:
<q>(Burmese)State media re****ted on Tuesday that 22,464 people had now
been
confirmed dead and another 41,054 people missing as a result of the
cyclone.
As rescue teams get to areas presently cut off, those figures are expected
to rise.
Almost all of the deaths occurred in the Irrawaddy river delta region,
where
more people were killed by the tidal wave than the cyclone itself,
Minister
for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told re****ters in Rangoon.
"The wave was up to 12ft [3.5m] high and it swept away and inundated half
the houses in low-lying villages," he said. "They did not have anywhere to
flee."
Some 95% of the homes in the city of Bogalay in the Irrawaddy delta were
destroyed and most of its 190,000 residents are now homeless, he added.
The neighbouring cities of Labutta and Pyapon have also been badly
affected.
A doctor in Labutta told the BBC that half of the city had vanished and
dozens of surrounding villages washed away. </q>
The estimated (as of 2005) total population living within flooded areas is
1,732,000, half of whom were/are in the Irawaddy. An estimate of 100,000
would be a 6% fatality rate within areas of flooding, which seems not an
inflated expectation, considering that 4 meter wave heights from the storm
surge ran over a broad swath of low-lying, highly-populated coastal areas,
and that further inland, extensive mudslides from heavy rain could be
expected to increase the death toll somewhat.
There are also satellite images that show the area of destruction, at
higher
resolution than are presented on the internet; to what extent these have
contributed to fatality counts I could not say.
However, those wi****ng a 1.1mb pdf document, a composite of MODIS
satellite
imagery acquired at 250m resolution, overlain with geographic and
population
information, and showing the areas of flooding remaining on the 5th of
May,
can get for themselves a fair idea of how many hundreds of thousands were
in
the path of the storm surge:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/06_05_08_unosat_myanmar.pdf
= http://tinyurl.com/6cqr36
> US has not been given the approval yet to give food aid as their offer
was
not accepted by the Burnese Junta.
Last I'd heard the junta was saying okay to the food, and little doubt
they
will gladly soak up as much money as is offered, but they were not okaying
foreigners afoot in Burma, despite the fact that there are hundreds of
thousands more Burmese in need of supplies than the generals' men could
see
to.
> Seriosuly, how did the 100,000 deaths really come to it?.
> Was there some one countiing it across the destruction path of the
typhoon?
My quoted and written text and linked-to map up-page is hopefully of some
help.
There definitely was 'someone' *tracking* the typhoon as it approached
Burma, and their continuing alerts did not 'inspire' the junta to make
timely public warnings, nor mobilize troops to make proactive evacuations
and take other preparatory measures.
To be clear about this: the junta was informed TWO DAYS before the storm
made landfall as to where and when it would hit, and after commiting the
'passive' act of willfully and maliciously leaving the Irrawaddy residents
insufficiently alerted and aided toward surviving the predicted storm
surge,
follows up with *actively* resisting the arrival of sufficient manpower to
get relief to hundreds of thousands in need.
These facts seem more significant than whether 25, 50, 100, or however
many
thousand deaths occurred, as the untold thousands of AVOIDABLE deaths,
before-hand and after the fact of the typhoon (or cyclone) making landfall
are on the heads (if not the hearts) of the junta.
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