Sri Lanka 'on top of disaster'

"I think we're on top of the disaster," Tara de Mel, director of the government's Centre for National Operations (CNO), told AFP. "We at least know where the gaps are and what to do to fill those gaps."

De Mel said the distribution of aid had been cleared after a bottleneck that saw relief supplies arriving from international donor agencies piling up at the airport on the outskirts of Colombo.

However, relief workers were desperately still trying to reach remote parts of the east coast, she said at the CNO headquarters here where about 100 people, half of them volunteers, are coordinating relief for the estimated 860,000 people left homeless 10 days ago by the tsunamis.

"Some parts of the east coast have not been reached. We are receiving reports that some families are still holed up," de Mel said, acknowledging their situation would by now be "desperate".

"But each day we are reaching more and more people. We have already reached more than 75 percent of those affected and that figure is increasing all the time."

The CNO was set up by President Chandrika Kumaratunga soon after the disaster struck on December 26, killing at least 30,229 people in Sri Lanka and 150,000 in the region.

A panel of psychologists and psychiatrists, meanwhile, had been set up to coordinate "psycho-social intervention" for survivors of the tragedy, whom doctors are saying are beginning to crack from trauma-related stress.