Shortages possible after N. Korea blast

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," Banbury said -- including antibiotics, steroids and painkillers. 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.

Pierette Vulthi, a UNICEF representative in Pyongyang, said the devastation at the school could have been far more lethal. She said the blast occurred just after noon, 10 minutes after the morning session ended, and many children had already left.

"It could have been much worse," Vulthi said.

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.

"They've been taken in by other families," Beijing-based Red Cross spokesman John Sparrow said Sunday. "We were fearing people on the streets. We breathed a big sigh of relief when we saw that wasn't the case."

Aid workers recounted seeing huge craters, twisted railroad tracks and scorched buildings. But most of the 1,300 people that North Korean officials said were injured had been evacuated before the aid workers arrived in nearby Sinuiju.

"People were cleaning up by hand and loading their meager belongings onto ox carts," Banbury said after visiting Sunday. "They looked like World War I refugees."

U.N. officials estimated 40 percent of Ryongchon was damaged.

North Korea's communist government relaxed its normally intense secrecy as it pleaded for international help. It has blamed the disaster on human error, saying the cargo of oil and chemicals ignited when workers knocked the train cars against power lines. The statement was unusually frank for a government that controls information tightly, both to the world and its own people.