North Korea Reports Blast Damage at $365M

BEIJING – North Korean train explosion victims battling severe burns and meager medical options received visits Tuesday from international aid workers, who began assessing long-term needs for relief – including ways to make sure “traumatized” children return to school.

North Korea said Tuesday the disaster caused about $356 million in damage – far above what international donors have promised. South Korea has promised $1 million in relief goods, and the United States said it would give $100,000 to the Red Cross to help those left homeless from Thursday’s explosion.

Germany said Tuesday it would send $119,000 to finance food deliveries and building material. China has dispatched truckloads of tents, blankets and food to its neighbor. Japan, Russia, Australia and the United States have also offered to send supplies.

KCNA, the North Korea’s official news agency, said more than 30 public buildings and houses for at least 8,100 families were destroyed, and that the blast was equivalent to about 100 one-ton bombs going off at the same time.

Getting more food, blankets and medicine to the thousands injured and made homeless are among the priorities, aid agencies said.

Private aid organizations, U.N. groups and the Red Cross “are proceeding with detailed plans for getting the job done, making sure things are reaching the right spots,” Masood Heyder, U.N. coordinator in the North’s capital, Pyongyang, told The Associated Press.

The death toll stood Tuesday at 161 – 76 of them children at a school destroyed by the blast – with more than 1,300 people injured and many more left homeless, aid agencies said.

“We saw a number of families searching for their belongings – what was left of them – and then loading what little they could find onto hand-pushed carts or ox carts and moving out of town to find new accommodation elsewhere,” said Tony Banbury, the program’s Asia regional director of the U.N. World Food Program.

“It was a very sad and poignant sight.”

The destroyed school taught more than 1,000 students a day, and the U.N. Children’s Fund was looking for other buildings nearby where classes could be held, said Pierette Vulthi, UNICEF’S representative in Pyongyang.

“We know that for children who have been traumatized, that going to school restores a sense of normalcy,” she said. “It is psychologically extremely important.”

Video released by the United Nations showed patients squeezed two to a bed in shabby hospitals. Many had compresses over their eyes and facial injuries from being struck by a wave of glass, rubble and heat in the blast Thursday in Ryongchon, not far from the North’s border with China.

“It was really a horrific scene,” said Richard Ragan, North Korea director for the WFP. He toured a hospital in the nearby city of Sinuiju.

Banbury said he saw patients whose “skin was charred and ripped off” and others whose faces had been blackened by apparent chemical burns. He said doctors told him five victims had been completely blinded.

During their visit Sunday, the hospital had 360 patients – about 60 percent were children, Banbury said. The number had dropped to about 200 by Tuesday, he said.

Aid workers said even basic equipment like sutures and intravenous drips were scarce, and that donated goods were being used up as quickly as they could be supplied. The impoverished country is chronically short of fuel, electricity and food.

The Red Cross launched an emergency appeal Monday for $1.3 million in aid for blast victims. A three-month supply of antibiotics, anesthetics and bandages issued to North Korean hospitals over the weekend has already been depleted.

The World Food Program was also going to ask for 1,100 tons in food aid, Banbury said. The group has already distributed about 7.7 tons of food to the Sinuiju hospital and the blast site, he said.

North Korea’s communist government relaxed its normally intense secrecy as it pleaded for international help with the disaster, which it blamed on workers who knocked train cars carrying oil and chemicals against power lines, touching off the massive explosion.

But the North balked at letting Red Cross aid trucks from rival South Korea travel across the Demilitarized Zone that has separated the two countries since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended without a peace treaty.

The Pyongyang government also didn’t respond to a South Korean offer to unload ships carrying relief goods at ports near Ryongchon.

Also Tuesday, officials from North and South Korea met in the northern city of Kaesong to discuss relief operations. Details of the talks were not available until the Southern delegates return home later in the day, the South’s Unification Ministry said.