Editorial: A New Year marked by catastrophe

Happy New Year seems hardly the right greeting today as millions of people around the Indian Ocean struggle with a catastrophe. Natural disasters touch us all in the way that distant calamities attributable to human conflict and misgovernment might not.

A week ago the coastal communities of Sumatra, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka had no more reason than New Zealanders to fear a force nine earthquake that would send a devastating tsunami their way.

That is to say, they had every reason to fear one, in hindsight, as do New Zealanders more than most. We live on the rim of the Pacific plate. The earthquakes and volcanic activity here are slight tremors of the tension far below.

Fortunately, the human instinct is not to live in fear of something that might happen tomorrow but, equally, might not happen for a millennium. When it happens we shudder for those who were happily swimming in the sea, sunbathing on the beach or simply going about their daily business within reach of the extraordinary waves.

Now with each day that passes, we sympathise equally with the families who have lost someone or who still wait anxiously for word of someone thought to have been in the stricken places at the time.

The Herald is in a position to provide them with particular help. Our website, bearing the country's name, attracts heavy traffic from New Zealanders travelling overseas. It is running a ready-messaging service for those in this country or abroad trying to make contact in the wake of the tsunami.

We want to help the devastated places more conventionally, too, with a fund to which readers are invited to contribute. Every dollar will help the estimated five million people fighting for survival without food or clean water, homes or livelihoods. The world has already pledged more than $350 million in cash and sent hundreds of tonnes of emergency supplies by ships and aircraft.

The United Nations is co-ordinating a relief effort larger than any previously and the United States has formed a coalition with Japan, India and Australia to provide further effort. Every fund will help.

Inevitably, the emergency aid does not always get through to some places where it is most needed. The Aceh region of northern Sumatra, closest to the epicentre of the quake, is clearly the hardest hit. Vast tracts of the region are still flooded nearly a week after the waves struck. Few buildings are left standing, people are scrabbling for food among mud and corpses.

At least there are no reports that the longstanding political dissension in the independence-seeking region is disrupting the relief effort. It is probably the scale of the need there - the province accounts for half Indonesia's estimated toll - that is proving hard to meet.

We should spare a thought at this stage, too, for the body identification teams, including one from this country, going to work in appalling conditions. Unknown bodies must now be buried in the hope that they might later be identified by DNA, fingerprints, teeth or whatever the teams can usefully retain.

This is not a subject anybody would want to be contemplating in a festive season but nature has no regard for the calendar. The task now is to contribute in whatever way we can so that a year from now the world might look back on a collective effort of generosity equal to the scale of the disaster.

Then indeed, we can hail a happier new year.