Heat wave leaves more than 1,000 dead

HYDERABAD, India -- The death toll from a heat wave that has gripped southeastern India rose to 1,030 Wednesday as reports trickled in from remote rural villages. Most of the dead were older people unable to bear temperatures that reached 122 degrees.

Officials were still adding up the toll in Andhra Pradesh state, but it was already the highest one-week death count on record for any Indian heat wave.

"There seems to be no end to our suffering," said P. Venkateshwara Rao, a fish farmer in the town of Kaikalur. "We are totally helpless in the face of relentless heat."

The death toll "is much worse than we had anticipated," relief commissioner D.C. Roshaiah said in Hyderabad, the state capital. "We are getting information very slowly from the remote rural areas."

In the hardest-hit districts, mostly on the Bay of Bengal, the heat was so intense that tin-roofed shanties turned into ovens, ponds and rivers dried up, birds fell from the sky and animals collapsed.

All the deaths occurred May 9-15, and the victims were mostly the elderly and the poor, who could not withstand the brutal heat, which causes dehydration and sunstroke. Farm laborers and rickshaw pullers who had worked instead of taking shelter also died.

It is the highest one-week toll on record for any Indian heat wave, meteorologists said. Weather officials said past heat waves have never killed many more than a few hundred in a week countrywide.

Similar heat waves struck Andhra Pradesh in 1996 and 1998. Andhra Pradesh is the fifth-largest state in India, with 76 million people.