Hospital struggles to care for N. Korea blast victims

DANDONG, China – Injured children lay on file cabinets as an overcrowded North Korean hospital struggled to cope without enough beds or medicine for hundreds of victims from last week’s train explosion, an aid worker who visited the facility said Sunday.

Sinuiju Provincial Hospital, just across the border from China, was treating 360 people injured in the blast, according to Tony Banbury, Asia regional director for the U.N. World Food Program. More than 60 percent of the victims there were children, he said.

“They clearly lack the ability to care for all the patients,” Banbury said.

Thursday’s huge explosion in the town of Ryongchon, fed by oil and chemicals, killed 161 people and injured at least 1,300, officials said.

The death toll rose by seven Sunday, but it was unclear whether the higher number reflected new fatalities or simply freshly confirmed casualties. Aid agencies didn’t say whether they expected the number to increase.

As relief workers assessed damage, trucks crammed with tents, blankets, canned food and packages of instant noodles rumbled across the Chinese frontier into North Korea, part of a multinational offer of help. South Korea, Japan and Australia also offered aid.

Eleven trucks from China crossed the bridge into North Korea on Sunday, carrying $120,000 worth of aid. The trucks were driven by Chinese police and bore red-and-white banners saying “donations from the government of the People’s Republic of China.”

Lee Yoon-goo, the Red Cross chief in Seoul, proposed coordinating relief efforts with North Korea’s Red Cross in a telephone message via Red Cross liaison officers at the truce village of Panmunjom, in the buffer zone where the Koreas have faced off since their war in the early 1950s.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said his country also would help if Pyongyang asks. “But at this stage, they do seem to be coping, albeit not very well, with this disaster,” Downer told Australian television’s Ten Network.

In Sinuiju’s hospital, Banbury said the most serious injuries were suffered by children in a nearby school who were struck by a wave of glass, rubble and heat. Many had serious eye injuries, he said.

The hospital was “short of just about everything,” including antibiotics, steroids and painkillers, Banbury said. Equipment wasn’t plugged in, suggesting it was broken or electricity was insufficient, and the number of beds was so meager that some children were resting on file cabinets.

Nearly half of the dead were children in the school, which was torn apart by the blast. The disaster also left thousands of Ryongchon residents homeless.

Copyright ©2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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