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American Morning

Interview With Charles Lyons

Aired January 01, 2004 - 08:34   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get right to Iran now, where authorities say efforts to find survivors of last week's earthquake are essentially over. That announcement comes even though seven more survivors were pulled out of the devastation yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is easing restrictions on sending money and goods to Iran.

Ryan Chilcote joins us this morning from the city hard hit by that quake, Bam -- Ryan, good morning.

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad.

Well, we are in the main cemetery in the city of Bam and it is full of heartbreaking scenes here. In accordance with Islamic tradition, the loved ones of someone who passes away go to the cemetery to be at the grave on the sixth night after that person passes away. And we are now on the sixth night after that earthquake on Friday that literally flattened this city.

I want to show you some of the scenes here.

If we can pan over to the family standing with a shovel at one of the graves. They just completed marking that grave. This is something you do. You come, the relatives come, they pray for their loved one. It's really about being with that person almost a week after. It's a special moment.

Wherever you look, if we could come back over here, there's another family, people wailing, people crying, people praying. This was an absolutely devastating earthquake. According to new figures we have from the United Nations, the death toll here now stands at 28,100. That's a bit of a revision. Initially, the Iranians were reporting 30,000, but now the number has become -- are getting a bit clearer.

Absolutely heartbreaking scenes. A lot of the families here have been telling us that they lost everyone. One family I spoke with just a short while ago said that they would like to leave this city. Their home was destroyed. But they say they don't have the means to do that, they don't have the money, they don't have the transportation and, most importantly, perhaps, they don't have anywhere to go.

Now, the Iranian government has suspended all search and rescue operations in the city of Bam unless they have clear and convincing, they say, evidence that there is someone alive at any particular site. They are not going to dig unless they really think that there might be someone to find at any particular site.

Still, just before they made that announcement, there was a very dramatic search and rescue effort yesterday evening that involved rescue teams from the United States, Denmark and Iran. The U.S. team had just arrived. These were firefighters from Fairfax, Virginia taking part in this effort. A Danish sniffer dog had picked up what they thought were some signs of life. Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not find anyone. But it was a very good example of the real perseverance of the rescue teams here and the U.S. team really getting into the thick of it on their first night in the country -- Soledad.

O'BRIEN: Ryan Chilcote for us this morning.

Sad to see, Ryan.

Thank you for that update.

And though the search for survivors, as Ryan just reported, is pretty much over, the daunting task of helping the injured and the homeless goes on.

With us this morning to talk about the humanitarian efforts in Iran and how they're progressing is Charles Lyons.

He is the president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Nice to see you.

CHARLES LYONS, PRESIDENT, U.S. FUND FOR UNICEF: Nice to see you.

O'BRIEN: Thanks for being with us.

What's your big concern now? It's moved past the number of dead and it's moved on to the survivors and the people who are fighting for their lives. Is it disease, really, at this point?

LYONS: It's disease. It's cold and particularly for the kids, it's severe trauma.

O'BRIEN: Let's talk about that. I've heard some reports about how some of these children are responding. Elaborate for me a little bit about it and tell me about the ages and what you're seeing and the numbers of children.

LYONS: It's, sadly, it's a classic sort of response to this kind of catastrophe because a child -- and we're talking about two-year- olds up to 10 and 12-year-olds, really even adults are going to be traumatized by such a catastrophe -- but in a young child who has, in many cases, and we estimate as many as 1,200 children have been orphaned by this earthquake. They've lost their parents. They've lost other family members. We don't have an estimate yet of the number of teachers who were killed. Two thirds of the health workers are estimated to have been killed by the earthquake.

So everything that they know has been destroyed, from their home to their school to a clinic. And so we're already getting reports of kids that are so traumatized that they're unable even to say their name.

So our task is to get them back into some sort of environment that might be as close to normal as you can muster in that kind of an environment.

O'BRIEN: How do you do that? I mean when you talk about it, you've just listed every major problem you have now and that's the infrastructure is essentially gone, the hospitals, the health clinics destroyed. So how do you rebuild from nothing?

LYONS: The good news is we know how to do this, unfortunately, because we're practiced at it from so many other emergencies. There are at least three plane loads of supplies that we've been able to get into the city. You get larger tents and you set them up. They become temporary classrooms. You have something called school in a box that we literally -- it's a trunk. It's got supplies enough for 80 kids to be in school for three months and supplies for two teachers. We've already got over 400 of those in. You can do the math. That reaches a large number of kids. You open that up. You have a tent. You can assemble a classroom in less than a day.

And for kids that are traumatized like that, singing a song, kicking a soccer ball, drawing a picture, being with other kids...

O'BRIEN: A routine brings them back.

LYONS: And, blessedly for the parents and family members, to have a safe place for those kids to go during the day as you're trying to sort out what on earth you're going to do with your destroyed home.

O'BRIEN: Are you surprised that they've called off the search? I mean there's a, you know, the good news, seven people were rescued and obviously they had good information that there were live people down there. As we heard from Ryan, they're not going to search if they don't have a good sense that there are living beings down there. At the same time, it seems strange, seven people rescued, effectively the search and rescue is over.

LYONS: It's evidence that they can't do everything they want to do at the same time. They're trying to strike a balance between that which they think they can still accomplish by searching and that which they're faced with now. Those that have survived the earthquake are struggling to survive the conditions in the aftermath of that earthquake. I'm not surprised.

But I also won't be surprised if in a day or two we hear of another miraculous discovery of some sort.

O'BRIEN: A massive task ahead.

How do people send aid to folks there?

LYONS: Well, everything that we're doing is on the basis of voluntary help. And so on January 1, when people might be at home or getting online, they certainly could go online and make a contribution.

O'BRIEN: To?

LYONS: Unicefusa.org, www.unicefusa. That allows us to buy more tents, more emergency health kits, children -- sets of children's clothes, school in a box, all those things that we need to get into Bam.

O'BRIEN: And you know they certainly need it.

Charles Lyons, nice to have you.

Thanks so much.

LYONS: It was great to be with you again.

O'BRIEN: And, unfortunately, you know, you and I talk every so often, which is sometimes bad news.

But thank you for giving us a way for people to help.

LYONS: Thank you very much.

O'BRIEN: Appreciate it.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired January 1, 2004 - 08:34   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get right to Iran now, where authorities say efforts to find survivors of last week's earthquake are essentially over. That announcement comes even though seven more survivors were pulled out of the devastation yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is easing restrictions on sending money and goods to Iran.

Ryan Chilcote joins us this morning from the city hard hit by that quake, Bam -- Ryan, good morning.

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad.

Well, we are in the main cemetery in the city of Bam and it is full of heartbreaking scenes here. In accordance with Islamic tradition, the loved ones of someone who passes away go to the cemetery to be at the grave on the sixth night after that person passes away. And we are now on the sixth night after that earthquake on Friday that literally flattened this city.

I want to show you some of the scenes here.

If we can pan over to the family standing with a shovel at one of the graves. They just completed marking that grave. This is something you do. You come, the relatives come, they pray for their loved one. It's really about being with that person almost a week after. It's a special moment.

Wherever you look, if we could come back over here, there's another family, people wailing, people crying, people praying. This was an absolutely devastating earthquake. According to new figures we have from the United Nations, the death toll here now stands at 28,100. That's a bit of a revision. Initially, the Iranians were reporting 30,000, but now the number has become -- are getting a bit clearer.

Absolutely heartbreaking scenes. A lot of the families here have been telling us that they lost everyone. One family I spoke with just a short while ago said that they would like to leave this city. Their home was destroyed. But they say they don't have the means to do that, they don't have the money, they don't have the transportation and, most importantly, perhaps, they don't have anywhere to go.

Now, the Iranian government has suspended all search and rescue operations in the city of Bam unless they have clear and convincing, they say, evidence that there is someone alive at any particular site. They are not going to dig unless they really think that there might be someone to find at any particular site.

Still, just before they made that announcement, there was a very dramatic search and rescue effort yesterday evening that involved rescue teams from the United States, Denmark and Iran. The U.S. team had just arrived. These were firefighters from Fairfax, Virginia taking part in this effort. A Danish sniffer dog had picked up what they thought were some signs of life. Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not find anyone. But it was a very good example of the real perseverance of the rescue teams here and the U.S. team really getting into the thick of it on their first night in the country -- Soledad.

O'BRIEN: Ryan Chilcote for us this morning.

Sad to see, Ryan.

Thank you for that update.

And though the search for survivors, as Ryan just reported, is pretty much over, the daunting task of helping the injured and the homeless goes on.

With us this morning to talk about the humanitarian efforts in Iran and how they're progressing is Charles Lyons.

He is the president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Nice to see you.

CHARLES LYONS, PRESIDENT, U.S. FUND FOR UNICEF: Nice to see you.

O'BRIEN: Thanks for being with us.

What's your big concern now? It's moved past the number of dead and it's moved on to the survivors and the people who are fighting for their lives. Is it disease, really, at this point?

LYONS: It's disease. It's cold and particularly for the kids, it's severe trauma.

O'BRIEN: Let's talk about that. I've heard some reports about how some of these children are responding. Elaborate for me a little bit about it and tell me about the ages and what you're seeing and the numbers of children.

LYONS: It's, sadly, it's a classic sort of response to this kind of catastrophe because a child -- and we're talking about two-year- olds up to 10 and 12-year-olds, really even adults are going to be traumatized by such a catastrophe -- but in a young child who has, in many cases, and we estimate as many as 1,200 children have been orphaned by this earthquake. They've lost their parents. They've lost other family members. We don't have an estimate yet of the number of teachers who were killed. Two thirds of the health workers are estimated to have been killed by the earthquake.

So everything that they know has been destroyed, from their home to their school to a clinic. And so we're already getting reports of kids that are so traumatized that they're unable even to say their name.

So our task is to get them back into some sort of environment that might be as close to normal as you can muster in that kind of an environment.

O'BRIEN: How do you do that? I mean when you talk about it, you've just listed every major problem you have now and that's the infrastructure is essentially gone, the hospitals, the health clinics destroyed. So how do you rebuild from nothing?

LYONS: The good news is we know how to do this, unfortunately, because we're practiced at it from so many other emergencies. There are at least three plane loads of supplies that we've been able to get into the city. You get larger tents and you set them up. They become temporary classrooms. You have something called school in a box that we literally -- it's a trunk. It's got supplies enough for 80 kids to be in school for three months and supplies for two teachers. We've already got over 400 of those in. You can do the math. That reaches a large number of kids. You open that up. You have a tent. You can assemble a classroom in less than a day.

And for kids that are traumatized like that, singing a song, kicking a soccer ball, drawing a picture, being with other kids...

O'BRIEN: A routine brings them back.

LYONS: And, blessedly for the parents and family members, to have a safe place for those kids to go during the day as you're trying to sort out what on earth you're going to do with your destroyed home.

O'BRIEN: Are you surprised that they've called off the search? I mean there's a, you know, the good news, seven people were rescued and obviously they had good information that there were live people down there. As we heard from Ryan, they're not going to search if they don't have a good sense that there are living beings down there. At the same time, it seems strange, seven people rescued, effectively the search and rescue is over.

LYONS: It's evidence that they can't do everything they want to do at the same time. They're trying to strike a balance between that which they think they can still accomplish by searching and that which they're faced with now. Those that have survived the earthquake are struggling to survive the conditions in the aftermath of that earthquake. I'm not surprised.

But I also won't be surprised if in a day or two we hear of another miraculous discovery of some sort.

O'BRIEN: A massive task ahead.

How do people send aid to folks there?

LYONS: Well, everything that we're doing is on the basis of voluntary help. And so on January 1, when people might be at home or getting online, they certainly could go online and make a contribution.

O'BRIEN: To?

LYONS: Unicefusa.org, www.unicefusa. That allows us to buy more tents, more emergency health kits, children -- sets of children's clothes, school in a box, all those things that we need to get into Bam.

O'BRIEN: And you know they certainly need it.

Charles Lyons, nice to have you.

Thanks so much.

LYONS: It was great to be with you again.

O'BRIEN: And, unfortunately, you know, you and I talk every so often, which is sometimes bad news.

But thank you for giving us a way for people to help.

LYONS: Thank you very much.

O'BRIEN: Appreciate it.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com