was disrupted due to the destruction of dozens of bridges and much of the road being washed away or blocked by mud. The western districts of Aceh, lying nearest the epicenter of the magnitude-9 earthquake that caused the tsunami, were a "roadless" area, according to UN Emergency Coordinator Jan Egeland. "The lack of access by road is a key problem aid agencies face in the northern and western parts of Aceh," Chris Lom, a spokesman in the region for the International Organisation for Migration, said on 7 January. A number of towns on the west coast were therefore cut off from the road from any airport or port. Relief efforts, therefore, required the use of helicopter or boat. In the town of Meulaboh in Aceh, for instance, where thousands are waited for aid, 99 percent of the bridges were gone and 60 percent of asphalt roads awash with mud according to Lom. "An escalation in the number of deaths is almost a certainty," according to William Hyde, Jakarta-based emergency relief coordinator for the International Organisation for Migration. "So much of the coastline couldn't be accessed." Government officials in Indonesia acknowledged they were forced to make crude estimates of the death toll because of the scale of the devastation and the breakdown of civil governance. They were forced to use such measures as counting the number of bodies in one mass grave and multiplying that by the number of such plots. In other cases, they estimated the population of a village, counted the survivors and assumed the rest were dead. () The scale of the breakdown of civil governance was shown by the fact that after a week 1400 policemen were missing in Aceh, and not reported in. The entire provincial government of Aceh, which had its capital at Banda Aceh was reportedly wiped out by the deaths of the provincial legislators, and many government workers. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the devastation in the Indonesian province of Aceh as the worst he had ever seen, after touring the region by helicopter on Friday 7 January 2005. Banda Aceh Banda Aceh was a city with a population of about 264,000 inhabitants before the tsunami. The majority of the casualties were in the city. Around 60,000 people were confirmed killed in the capital of Banda Aceh alone, the government announced. Over one thousand bodies found on the streets in the provincial capital