In Indonesia's Aceh province the government's figures have passed five thousand but some officials believe that number could well double. The provincial capital, Banda Aceh, has been destroyed.

Presenter/Interviewer: Peter Cave

Speakers: Tim Palmer, Indonesia correspondent

In Indonesia's Aceh province the government's figures have passed 5,000, but some officials believe that number could well double. Our correspondent Tim Palmer has now made his way along the island to the capital Banda Aceh. He's been without sleep for two days now. He describes conditions in the city closest to the source of the disaster.

Palmer: This is an entirely broken city, Peter. Banda Aceh has no electricity except for a few small official centres, no telephones except for local calls from the same government centres, and as of a few hours ago no petrol.

People are looting cars that have been stacked up by the waves, and just smashed into buildings, trying to siphon petrol out, but this city really is logistically completely in a state of collapse.

And possibly that's why the bodies that were dumped in the streets almost two days ago now lie exactly where they were dumped, bloating up in the streets, with thousands of people sleeping a second night in the streets, amongst those bodies.

Cave: Is there any sign that aid is getting in?

Palmer: Not at all. We hear that a plane might be landing in Banda Aceh in the next few hours. The Government says it's coordinating the relief effort from Medan, but we simply aren't seeing any results of that here at all. People seem to be mainly doing the body recovery themselves, but obviously the task has been too much for them.

Communications Minister Sofyan Djalil said just 30 kilometres down the coast from here – on the west coast road, which is the area that we know virtually nothing about since the quake struck – in one small beachside area there he believes there are 1,000 bodies yet to be recovered.

Now he will be flying in the next few hours further down the coast to the town of Meulaboh, the largest centre closest to the epicentre of the earthquake, and a place that people have held grave fears about since the quake struck, and yet there's been no information, though he does say, just hours before he was due to step onto that helicopter and go down there, that army sources have now told him that the waves raced two kilometres inland in that town, so the fears could be justified.

Cave: So we've only seen a very small part of the devastation so far.

Palmer: I believe so, and the Vice President, Jusuf Kalla, visited the east coast areas today that were worst struck, and he is already saying that he believes the figures that were around in the past 24 hours of 4,000, possibly 5,000 people could easily double from what he has seen, and in fact another senior minister has said he believes it could be beyond that to maybe 20,000 deaths.

Cave: Tim, with dead bodies on the street, with no water, with no petrol, how real is the fear that disease is going to even outstrip the effects of the earthquake and the tsunamis?

Palmer: It must be real from the contamination of the water supply here and the inability of people to get any sanitary conditions where they're living. There is so many thousands of people without homes now, and they're living, essentially, in a brackish swamp too, and I can tell you that this a perfect breeding ground for the mosquito-borne diseases which are the worst in this area too, so there certainly are real fears about some sort of epidemic breaking out here.

But at this stage, again, there are no real organised steps to tackle this. The city is basically a dump. It is smeared in a grey mud up to shoulder height on walls, up to a foot deep in some streets, with cars, animals, bodies, branches and bits of building just stacked up everywhere you look.