Devastating Myanmar cyclone death toll could hit 63,000

YANGON (Agencies) - More than 22,000 people were killed in Myanmar's devastating cyclone and 41,000 are still missing four days after the storm slammed into the country's southern coast, the government said Tuesday.

Aid workers raced to deliver food and water to the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta region, which was submerged by floodwaters, leaving scenes of utter devastation with homeless survivors running low on food and water.

Witnesses described horrific images of rice fields littered with corpses, and there were fears the death toll could rise much further.

State television said 22,464 people were killed and 40,695 were missing in Irrawaddy division, while 671 were killed and 359 people were missing in Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city, fearing that the death toll could hit 63,000

Save the Children, one of the few relief agencies allowed to operate in the secretive and impoverished Southeast Asian country, said it expected the toll to climb as high as 50,000.

"If at this stage, only four days in, the government are telling us the numbers are already reaching over 20,000 and there are 40,000 people missing, I think it could well go higher," spokesman Dan Collinson told AFP.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it went as high as 50,000," he said.

US President George W Bush urged Myanmar's military rulers to allow in international help, saying he was prepared to send navy ships to help the recovery.

The White House later announced it was offering an additional three million dollars in aid, building on its initial offer of 250,000 dollars.

A Pentagon spokesman said the USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship with 1,800 marines aboard, and three other naval vessels were off the coast of Thailand and could be redirected to Myanmar if asked to do so.

But the junta insisted foreign aid teams would have to negotiate before being allowed to operate here, and many agencies said they were still waiting for visas to allow their staff into the country.

In the government's first news conference since tropical cyclone Nargis barrelled into the Irrawaddy region early Saturday, it said that most of the delta town of Bogalay had been washed away.

"Ninety-five per cent of the houses in Bogalay were destroyed," Social Welfare Minister Maung Maung Swe told reporters. "Many people were killed in a 12-foot tidal wave."

Satellite images from US space agency NASA showed virtually the entire coastal plain of the country, once known as Burma and now one of the world's poorest nations, under water.

Aid groups were rushing to bring food, water, clothing and shelter into the country, whose military rulers have long turned their back on the outside world and prevented many aid charities from operating here.

"Getting it out to the affected populations will be a major challenge, given that there is widespread flooding," said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Bangkok. The UN's World Food Programme said it had begun distributing 800 tonnes of food to the hardest-hit areas that are both remote and densely populated, but that many coastal regions remained cut off due to flooding and road damage.