A disaster assistance response team from the U.S. Agency for International Development is being readied and the amphibious assault ship USS Essex, which has extensive medical facilities, is en route to the area, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

The United States also increased its aid contribution to $5 million.

The United Nations said at least 21 other countries have joined the effort to help those left homeless by Saturday's magnitude-6.3 quake, which killed more than 5,800 people. An estimated 647,000 people were displaced by the quake, nearly a third of them homeless and the rest staying with relatives, said Bambang Priyohadi, a senior provincial government official.

The government said Wednesday the temblor destroyed more than 135,000 homes, reducing them to piles of bricks, tiles and wood in less than a minute. Priyohadi based the displaced figure on the number of homes destroyed and a family index of 4.8 people per house.

The main hospital in hardest-hit Bantul district was still overwhelmed, with 400 patients for just over 100 beds, and doctors complained of a lack of supplies.

"We are short of splints, gauze, even beds,'' said Dr. Hidayat, the hospital's earthquake emergency coordinator, adding that 90 percent of the victims had bone fractures. "The minute we get fresh splits, they are gone.''

But conditions improved at several other hospitals, where parking lots and hallways that had been filled with hundreds of victims in the days after the quake were clear, with most patients now being treated in beds.

Workers removed a tent outside Yogyakarta's largest hospital, Sardjito, that had been used to shelter the injured.

The U.N.'s top humanitarian official said the aid effort was going well, and there had been major improvements in coordination among aid organizations and nations since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 131,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province alone.

"We are now reaching more and more victims,'' Jan Egeland told The Associated Press in Brussels, Belgium. "I am getting reports that we are making enormous progress.''

The government's Social Affairs Ministry said the official death toll rose Wednesday to 5,846.

Most survivors were still living in improvised shacks or group shelters erected in rice fields. Groups of families cooked together, each contributing scavenged food.

Despite government promises of aid, shortages of food and fresh water remained a pressing concern, and thousands of people used cardboard boxes to beg for cash and supplies from passing drivers.

The head of a Malaysia search and rescue team said hope had faded of finding more survivors or bodies, and his group had turned to clearing rubble from streets instead.

"The collapsed homes were all so small that anyone who was trapped would have been extracted by their family members,'' Abdul Aziz Ahmad said, adding his team found only one body Monday.

A 44-member team of Chinese doctors, search and rescue workers and seismologists also arrived with five tons of supplies, including a field hospital, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Thailand said it would send 48 military medical personnel, medicine and equipment.

Teams from Malaysia, Singapore, Norway and other nations already are working in the area.

The Asian Development Bank announced a total of $60 million in grants and low-interest loans to rebuild the earthquake zone.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has temporarily moved his office to Yogyakarta and spent a night sleeping in a tent with survivors, vowed to fight corruption in delivering aid money.

"I am ordering that not even one dollar will be misused,'' he said.

The quake was the fourth destructive temblor to hit Indonesia in the past 17 months, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami.

To persuade residents to heed evacuation orders, the Florida Division of Emergency Management is broadcasting public service announcements with recordings of 911 calls placed during Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

"The roof has completely caved in on us," a woman cries as chilling music swells, only to be told that rescuers cannot come out during the storm.

Speaking of the tactics, Craig Fugate, Florida's emergency management director, said last week at a news conference in Tallahassee, "We're going to use a sledgehammer."

This save-yourselves approach comes after government agencies were overwhelmed by pleas for help after last year's storms and strongly criticized as not responding swiftly or thoroughly enough to the public need. Now, officials have said repeatedly, only the elderly, the poor and the disabled should count on the government to help them escape a hurricane or endure its immediate aftermath.

Mississippi, where more than 200 residents died in Hurricane Katrina, unrolled a "Stay Alert. Stay Alive" hurricane awareness campaign in April. State officials told residents what to pack in a "go-kit" for evacuating (flashlight, radio, nonelectric can opener) and, like many others, commanded them to stockpile at least three days' worth of water and food.

Horry County, S.C., home to Myrtle Beach, held a hurricane exposition last month and is giving similar presentations at Kiwanis clubs and homeowners associations.

"The big shortfall is complacency with the community," said Randall Webster, director of Horry County Emergency Management. "Our main theme is, take interest as an individual and make preparations."

But will it work? Emergency management officials groaned this month at a poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc., which found that of 1,100 adults along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, 83 percent had taken no steps to fortify their homes this year, 68 percent had no hurricane survival kits and 60 percent had no family disaster plan.

"I can't rightfully say I see any increased sense of people getting ready," said Larry Gispert, emergency management director in Hillsborough County, Fla., home to Tampa. "It's like a psychological issue - 'If I don't think about bad things, bad things won't happen.' "

In Nags Head, N.C., Jimmy Austin, a former commercial fisherman who now operates his own seafood market, said he was unfazed by this year's predictions, some of which suggest that the Carolinas will be especially hard hit. He keeps his insurance current, Mr. Austin said, but sees no need for special precautions.

"I don't pay these things a whole lot of mind," said Mr. Austin, 69, a native of the Outer Banks. "Because they say so doesn't mean it's going to happen that way."

In Galveston, Tex., Keith Patterson, a resident there for 30 years, dismissed the urgency of a hurricane survival kit on Thursday. No use worrying about a hurricane until it is near, he said.

"When one is coming, I'll make preparations," said Mr. Patterson, 68, a retired purchasing clerk. "I'll get what I have to get then."

In Florida, the second annual tax holiday on hurricane supplies, from May 21 through June 1, has not drawn an overwhelming response, several store representatives said. But at least one store, the Lowe's in South Fort Myers, was selling more generators than barbecue grills last week, said John Sandford, operations manager there.

At a Home Depot, Brenda and Jerry Dyche of South Fort Myers were shopping for a generator last Wednesday. With that and a new roof, they said, they had no reason to flee.

"We'd just as soon be in our house," Mr. Dyche said. "Where are we going to go? I-75 is a parking lot by the time they evacuate everybody."

Likewise, Ronda Burke, who did not go inland last year to avoid Hurricane Rita but stayed on South Padre Island, Tex., to watch over her new health food cafe, Naturally's, said she would probably do the same this year if necessary.

"We feel about our store like you feel about a person," said Ms. Burke, whose husband took their two young children to higher ground as Hurricane Rita neared the Texas coast (and eventually came ashore far from South Padre Island). "We'd probably ride it out again."

Meanwhile, government agencies are preparing more thoroughly than ever, stockpiling water and food, improving communication technology and outfitting supply trucks with global positioning systems.

Hattiesburg, Miss., is buying $4 million worth of generators for its public buildings and water system. Broward County, Fla., bought a $500,000 command post vehicle to shuttle emergency managers among crisis spots. Many areas will offer more hurricane shelters this year, though officials like Herminio Lorenzo, the Miami-Dade County fire chief, are portraying them bleakly to encourage people to make their own plans.

"The very last place you would want to go is a Red Cross shelter," Mr. Lorenzo said last week at a community hurricane preparation meeting. "You're so close to the people sleeping next to you that you can feel the hair of their mustache on the side of your head."

Some communities are coaxing the public to prepare in a piecemeal way, like saving old milk jugs as emergency water containers and buying one extra can of food on every grocery trip. Escambia County, Fla., is publishing weekly shopping lists to try to get residents to stock up little by little. Martiza Vazquez of Miami said that approach had made preparing more manageable.

"Every time I go to the supermarket I buy four or five cans of tuna or soup or whatever," Ms. Vazquez, 37, said. "I have a checklist that came with the paper the other day, and I am using that to figure out how much is enough."

Waiting for a taxi to take her to her job at McDonald's, Chanavia Williams of Galveston, who makes $5.75 an hour, laughed at the notion of buying provisions to sock away.

"We got food, but I got none saved," said Ms. Williams, 17, the single parent of a 2-year-old, who lives in public housing.

Ms. Williams said she would have to sacrifice buying diapers and baby clothes to afford a hurricane survival kit.

Still, Ms. Williams, who evacuated on a bus as Hurricane Rita neared, said she wanted to prepare, echoing others who had frightening experiences last year. Wayne P. Sallade, emergency management director in Charlotte County, Fla., which was devastated by Hurricane Charley in 2004, said the Mason-Dixon poll numbers on hurricane preparation were skewed by people in states that had not had hurricanes recently.

"You talk to people in cities here, and there's an absolute fever for information," Mr. Sallade said.

That is also true in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast, where post-Hurricane Katrina anxiety has compelled many to prepare diligently this year.

But in Houston, Joe Laud, spokesman for the city's emergency center, said only 1,000 people with special needs had registered for public transportation to pick them up in an evacuation. During Hurricane Rita, Mr. Laud said, 25,000 such residents needed help evacuating.

Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, at his annual hurricane conference this month in Fort Lauderdale, sourly recalled the chaos after Hurricane Wilma last year, where throngs of residents lined up for free emergency supplies that quickly ran out.

"It makes it a lot harder when people line up in their Lexuses or Mercedeses to get ice and water at a public distribution site when the Publix is open a block away," Mr. Bush said.

As his audience of emergency workers applauded, he added, "I don't know about you, but it sure made me feel better to get that off my chest."

"Can you imagine what they'd do to cats?" asked Dick Bain, 78, a Wine Country resident who dispatched two of the animals with a shovel Friday.

Bain said he doesn't like killing animals but had to act after finding two marmots beneath a stack of carpentry wood next to his house.

"My neighbor got tackled (by marmots) two years ago and got chewed up pretty bad," Bain told the Yakima Herald-Republic.

The account could not be verified by the newspaper. Bain would not identify the man, saying his neighbor was embarrassed.

Also unconfirmed was an account that a resident got badly bitten after reaching into a water tank to remove a marmot that only appeared to be dead.

Ray Borgens, 81, said marmots leave unsavory calling cards in his carport, burrow under his house and once scooted up a ladder he left leaning against the roof.

"They were snooping around the air ducts up there," Borgens said.

Concerned about the droppings, which Bain said often are tracked indoors "even though you think you've cleaned it off," residents say officials in the Benton-Franklin Health Department have told them there's nothing the agency can do because the animals pose no public health risk, including the spread of infectious disease.

Police add that town ordinances prohibit residents from shooting the critters.

Officials in the state Department of Fish and Wildlife say residents likely will have to pay if they want to eradicate the infestation, and then only after clearing some bureaucratic hurdles. First, they must file a complaint with the agency's Yakima office, which then may refer them to a certified exterminator.

"These are not free services," agency spokeswoman Madonna Luers said. "We do not have the staff to go out there and deal with these situations."

To make the area less attractive to marmots, she advised securing garbage cans and other potential sources of food or nesting material.

She also advised trying to avoid marmot confrontations.

"They've probably become pretty accustomed to people," Luers said, "and it's not an animal you want to tangle with."

The 6.3 magnitude quake near the city of Yogyakarta left thousands injured and as many as 200,000 without homes.

Donations from around the world have continued to arrive as the relief operation, involving at least 22 countries, gathered pace.

The aid supplies, brought in by a succession of planes landing at Yogyakarta's airport, were unloaded into warehouses before being trucked south.

The UN has set up a co-ordination centre close to the airport to bring order to the flow of goods.

More international medical teams have flown in to help treat the injured, including personnel from the US, Japan and a 40-strong team and five tonnes of medical supplies from China.

A Singaporean field hospital has been treating patients, and fears of a health crisis appear to be receding, aid workers say.

The UN's top humanitarian co-ordinator, Jan Egeland, said the aid effort had made "enormous progress".

"The most critical need is medical assistance and after that it's water and sanitation, and third is emergency shelter," he told the Associated Press.

Distribution problems

But many areas are still waiting for aid deliveries.

On roads around Yogyakarta, people were begging motorists for money.

"Our village has many victims, houses are all destroyed and we have not received aid from the government," a teenage boy, Jumadi, told Reuters news agency.

"What else can we do?" he said.

The UN co-ordinator in Bantul, hardest hit by the earthquake, told the BBC the problem was not a shortage of aid but a problem of "distribution networks".

"The problem is how to bring these goods to those who really need it," he said.

One man, Trimoseh, whose house in Prenggan village near Bantul was destroyed, said he had very little food or water.

"Until now we haven't had any aid," he told Reuters. "But we are not angry, we are just hungry. We will wait for food."

The Asian Development Bank has promised $60m (£32m) in aid and loans to help the affected region.

The Indonesian government has pledged an initial 12kg of rice per family, and 200,000 rupiah ($21) for each survivor to cover clothing and household goods, and compensation for damaged houses.

The heavy rains and rough winds also saw several boats capsize off India's western coast, leading a local weather department to warn fishermen not to go to sea.

"Gusty winds and heavy rains will continue for the next 24 hours and we have sent a warning to fishermen asking them not to venture out to sea," weather official K.V. Singh said from the western coastal state of Goa where five trawlers capsized Tuesday. One sailor was reported missing.

Early Tuesday morning, a merchant vessel with 21 people aboard ran aground because of the strong winds and current, the Indian Coast Guard said.

"Twenty were rescued and handed over to port authorities," Commandant M. Prasad told AFP, adding that one person remained missing.

The advance of the rains upwards from the south is keenly watched as two-thirds of the country's billion-plus population earn their livelihood from agriculture, but poor infrastructure often means heavy flooding and loss of life.

Last year 400 people died in the financial hub Mumbai, in western Maharashtra state, after nearly 100 centimetres (40 inches) of rain fell in 24 hours.

The state's top official however promised that there would be no repeat of that disaster.

A project to desilt the river that runs through the city, to prevent this year's rains from overrunning badly neglected drainage facilities, has almost been completed, he said.

"I assure Mumbai's citizens that there won't be a repeat of last year during the monsoons," Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times Tuesday.

Already the Netherlands has one of the world's highest standards of flood protection, enough to withstand a storm of a magnitude that statisticians say occurs only once every 10,000 years.

Around 60 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, protected by an intricate system of dams and dykes. The Dutch also invented the polder, land reclaimed from the water.

"The effects of a future rise in sea level will be felt very strongly here," Deputy Transport Minister Melanie Schultz van Haegen said.

A devastating flood in 1953 that killed more than 2,000 people prompted the authorities to launch an unprecedented plan for coastal protection.

But with the KNMI predicting a rise in sea level of up to 35 centimeters (13.5 inches) by 2050, protection would have to be stepped up.

"We must be prepared for climate change," Schultz van Haegen said.

She said drier summers were also a cause for concern because dykes could dry out and burst.

The KNMI stressed they had left out the worst-case scenarios with the most extreme results.

"With these four scenarios you have a good chance that what happens in the next 50 years will be within these expectations," KNMI director Frits Brouwer said.

The predictions were released to enable the government to anticipate the pace of climate change and adapt policies accordingly, the KNMI said.

There will be changes in energy demand if winters warm up, while a warmer climate can influence agriculture because more can be grown but summer droughts could have adverse effects, and yields from wind energy parks can drop if wind speeds drop, as some scenarios predict, Schultz predicted.

The Netherlands is also working with other European countries on water management.

The country is the end point for several big rivers coming from Germany and Belgium, such as The Rhine and the Meuse that can be affected by either sudden droughts or rising water levels as the earth's temperature rises.

"Hopefully in June the European Union will present a new 'high water' plan based on a joint French-Dutch initiative to make sure the low lying countries are not stuck with the problems," Schultz said.

"We cannot stop glaciers melting but if we work together we can prevent that the Netherlands becomes Europe's drain," she added.

But the hardest blow the KNMI delivered to the Dutch Tuesday was that, according to the latest scenarios, the legendary Elfstedentocht ice skating marathon, held on over 200 kilometers of natural ice in the Friesland province, is less likely to occur in future.

Although the last marathon, named Elfstedentocht because it goes past 11 (elf) towns (steden), was held in 1997, each winter when the temperature drops below zero Celsius the Dutch get so-called Elfsteden fever.

The national primetime news shows report daily on the marathon's "ice masters" who check the state of the ice and have to give the all clear before the marathon can start.

In 1997 over 16,000 people participated in the Elfstedentocht.