UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- The United Nations says a top priority of the Indian Ocean tsunami relief operation would now be reaching people in Indonesia's ground zero of Aceh and Sumatera province on the northernmost island of Sumatra.
"There are still many areas that we have not been able to get people to, many areas are still, particularly on the western coast of Sumatra, unreachable by land," said Kevin Kennedy, director of coordination and response for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
He called Indonesia's northernmost provinces "the heart of the crisis," explaining officials have dubbed where the Dec. 26 tsunami first hit as "ground zero." The epicenter of the earthquake-producing tsunami was less than 60 miles offshore.
"Rather substantial progress," Kennedy said, was being made in the overall efforts to bring life-saving supplies to the survivors of the tsunami which is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 people in a dozen countries, injured 500,000 others and left up to 5 million more lacking basic services, many of them in emergency camps.
He told reporters at U.N. World Headquarters in New York in the coming days the relief operations would be calling on international military assistance to help repair key infrastructures, such as bridges, culverts and roads, to allow delivery of food and assistance in Aceh and Sumatera.
While helicopters are "absolutely critical" to the operation, they are an expensive way to bring in aid, Kennedy said, explaining that a Black Hawk helicopter carries about a half ton of food.
"Now that's extremely important because it may prevent people from losing their lives ... but what we will need are roads that we can drive 20-ton and 10-ton trucks down at a much lower cost and deliver much more assistance," he said.
Without clean water, antibiotics and other basic supplies, survivors face the prospect of deadly diarrhea and other diseases that -- in a worst case scenario -- could kill as many or more people than the actual tsunami itself.
In Sri Lanka, one of the worst-hit areas with at least 750,000 people affected, the relief operation will, by this weekend, probably have reached every person in need with at least initial food assistance and non-food items, "which is, I think a very significant achievement," Kennedy said.
Food already was on hand to assist all the estimated 50,000 beneficiaries in the Maldives, and efforts were underway to distribute food in Somalia where operations were complicated by geography and security concerns, he said.
Still, the biggest challenge remains on Sumatra where the killer waves penetrated up to 3 miles inland.
Kennedy said an "an air bridge" was opened between Subang, Malaysia, and Medan in Sumatera.
This allows entry into the region of wide-bodied aircraft with large quantities of relief supplies -- such as water treatment facilities, generators and fuelling systems -- that can be unloaded in Malaysia and transported onward by smaller planes.
The number of staff on the ground had increased to about 50 U.N. international personnel in Banda Aceh alone, along with up to 200 non-governmental organization and Red Cross and Red Crescent staff as well as hundreds of national staffers, Kennedy said.
At least three national staffers were killed in the disaster.
"We are increasing our deliveries day by day, both food and non-food items," he said. "We remain very concerned about the health situation, respiratory diseases, malaria, treatment for the injured, and we're working with the government and the various militaries to extend our health services."
He also highlighted progress in "putting into place the kind of coordination, arrangements, mechanisms that are required to bring together efficiently and effectively so many different moving parts" from such a multilateral operation that includes 11 military forces, all the governments of the 12 affected countries, dozens of non-governmental organizations, and various U.N. agencies and the Red Cross/Red Crescent operations.
In related developments, the office of the Global Compact -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's initiative to promote better business practices in human rights, labor and the environment -- announced Friday that private-sector organizations around the world had stepped in with unprecedented donations in the form of financial aid, food, medicine and other supplies and services.
It is hoped victims of natural disasters would benefit from faster and more effective rescue operations, starting Saturday when the Tampere Convention enters into force, simplifying the use of life-saving telecommunications equipment in the 30 countries that have ratified it.
Kennedy said that from the mobilization of assistance to the logistics chain, which will carry assistance to the intended beneficiaries, reliable telecommunications links were indispensable.
A day after launching the largest relief appeal ever in U.N. history for a natural disaster -- $977 million for 5 million people in five nations over six months -- the secretary-general visited Aceh, before flying on to Sri Lanka, saying, "I have never seen such utter destruction, mile after mile."
"And you wonder where are the people, what happened to them?" he added after a helicopter tour of ground zero.
The United Nations reported earlier this week it believed the few survivors of coastline villages apparently had fled further inland to higher ground, mostly rain forest.
