The stench of death hung over the Irrawaddy delta town of Labutta, where the blackened bodies of people and animals, rotting in the tropical heat, were washed aground as Burma’s cyclone floodwaters receded.

Struggling to breathe through the overpowering smells, residents wrapped layers of cloth around their faces and rubbed in balm to mask the odour. Death pervades this town so completely that many said they cannot sleep because ghosts of the cyclone victims torment them. One said: “We can’t sleep at night, because we can hear people shouting at night. Maybe these are the ghosts of the villagers."

Grossly bloated bodies lay strung out along the roads running atop embankments between paddies in a region that was the country’s rice bowl, but is now the centre of one of the world’s worst natural disasters.

One man said: “I cannot describe how I felt when I saw so many dead bodies.”

More than 60,000 people are dead or missing since Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy delta before ploughing across the country and through the main city of Rangoon.

Most of the dead were in towns like Labutta, the centre of a community that includes more than 50 villages where a total of 90,000 people lived.

Survivors have trekked through floodwaters from their washed-out villages into the town, only to discover precious few supplies to help them cope with the tragedy. Residents are sharing meagre supplies of wild rice with the new arrivals, even though most food supplies in the town have also been destroyed.

One man said of the desperate survivors arriving from villages that had been wiped out: “The people have no emotion left on their faces. They have never seen anything like this before. They have lost their families, they have nowhere to stay, and they have nothing to eat. They don’t know what the future will bring. "

Another said: "There is no drinking water. They are drinking coconut milk, and then they are eating coconuts to survive.” But even coconuts are scarce after floodwaters tore through this region, rising up to 20 feet (six metres) high. Residents said even the tree-tops were submerged at the height of the deluge.

The Burmese authorities have yet to set up emergency shelters for the people, residents said. One man said that the military had sent a ship to rescue stranded villagers, but that it is now stuck near Labutta after it ran out of fuel.

Many of the survivors who reached Labutta took shelter at Buddhist temples and pagodas, but others remained stranded on pockets of high ground, living in makeshift shelters.

The UN children’s fund UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the Christian relief group World Vision have arrived in the town, but so far they have only delivered water purification tablets, residents said. A doctor said: “We need emergency rescuers,” adding that residents are already suffering from diarrhoea because of the dire sanitary conditions.

Some survivors appeared to have suffered chemical burns during the storm, but the lack of food and clean water posed the greatest threat to the town.

One man said of survivors seeking shelter at the temples: “Thousands of people are in a difficult situation. They need emergency assistance. They are waiting for assistance, for food and shelter. Their main concern is the food."

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