WASHINGTON — Relief helicopters stepped up delivery of supplies and more than 20 U.S. Navy ships converged on tsunami-battered southern Asia on Saturday, as United Nations officials reported that enough food to feed half a million people had reached some of the worst-hit areas.
The U.S. military's disaster aid mission, one of the biggest in its history, concentrated on ferrying food and supplies to the ravaged northwest coast of Sumatra.
A steady stream of American Seahawk helicopters touched down near the epicenter of the disaster, delivering temporary shelters to the island, as the U.S. effort marked its first full day of operations.
Countries around the world Saturday escalated their response to the Asian disaster that has taken an estimated 150,000 lives.
Government pledges of assistance reached nearly $2 billion as Japan promised $500 million to the cause. The U.N. set up a tent city in the Indonesian provincial capital Banda Aceh to manage the aid coming in, saying that enough food to feed 500,000 people for two months had arrived.
In Thailand, even elephants were drafted to help clear debris and bloated bodies from seaside resorts.
"Today, we're really starting to get moving," Bo Asplund, the U.N. Development Program's resident coordinator in Indonesia, said in a telephone interview. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, which caused more than 6,000 deaths, he said, "it took three days for highly organized and very rich countries to bring in help. We're really scrambling here."
Getting the aid to those who need it remains a daunting problem in much of the region, officials acknowledge. Logjams at the region's antiquated airfields, for instance, have kept much of the aid from being quickly dispatched.
"The biggest constraints are the logistical bottlenecks by far," U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said at his daily briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world."
Navy Capt. Rodger Welch, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, said of the military's mission, "We're only beginning this effort. It will last until the host nations don't need our help any more and can manage themselves."
That could take years. Flash flooding in parts of Sri Lanka on Saturday and a magnitude 6.5 aftershock that jolted Sumatra sent thousands of evacuees fleeing for cover. And scenes of destruction across the 11 nations hit by the tsunami suggest an enormous reconstruction job ahead.
