The U.S. effort is headed by a battle group led by the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and an amphibious assault vessel carrying Marines toward the region. In addition to the Seahawk helicopters ferrying relief, sailors aboard the carrier were busy baking bread that would be frozen and flown to survivors, Capt. Welch of the Pacific Command said.
The ship is also equipped with a 49-bed hospital ward and an operating room. The military had flown injured people to hospitals on land, but had yet to bring anyone to the carrier for treatment, the spokesman said.
A squadron from Guam, carrying equipment capable of generating 25,000 gallons of potable water a day, also was en route, the Pentagon said, as was a Marine expeditionary strike force, led by the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard. Nine surveillance aircraft have also been deployed to gather information.
"I can't think of anything in the last 50 years equal to this," Welch said.
President Bush expressed anew the nation's sorrow over what he has called the "epic disaster." He ordered a weeklong ceremonial lowering of American flags at all U.S. installations.
"We join the world in feeling enormous sadness over a great human tragedy," Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "The carnage is of a scale that defies comprehension."
A U.S. delegation headed by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, was scheduled to depart for the region today to survey relief efforts and the humanitarian crisis that has caused widespread death and trauma and left more than 1 million homeless in 11 countries.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Saturday that he would visit Indonesia, thought to be the worst-hit nation, this week to launch a global appeal to fund the next six months of emergency and recovery work across the region.
Annan told ABC's "This Week" in an interview to be aired today that he would join Asian leaders at a conference in Jakarta on Jan. 6 to ask for even more funds to sustain the long recovery. He estimated that rebuilding the stricken region would take five to 10 years and billions of dollars.
To get relief supplies to areas where roads and airstrips had been washed away by the tsunami, Egeland appealed to a core group of donors for helicopters, air traffic control units, boats and landing craft, as well as cargo planes and several hundreds trucks. It may take "many days" to reach every stricken area, he warned.
