"Around Ampara is one of the worst-affected areas," Schofield said in a telephone interview from the group's headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. He added that 177,000 people, displaced by destruction along the coast, had fled about 12 miles inland and set up camps around Ampara, because it is the largest town in the vicinity. Medair reports that 120 camps have cropped up; the World Health Organization estimates the number at 500.

Deseret Morning News graphic After tsunami, a health crisis looms Requires Adobe Acrobat.

"We hope also to be able to chlorinate wells that have been contaminated," Schofield said.

One problem in Sri Lanka is that many wells — 1,000, according to UNICEF — have been contaminated by salt water, which must be pumped out to let fresh water in.

"We're bringing in pumps to clean out the wells," Ironside said. He said that the government in Sri Lanka had requested several dozen pumps and that UNICEF was shipping the dozen or so it already had on hand.

Schofield said Medair hoped to drill new wells, with a new technique that uses tubing and a high-pressure jet of water as the drill bit, to penetrate about 20 feet into the earth to find clean water. The technique works only in soft or sandy soil, not rock, and has worked well in Madagascar and Darfur.

"We hope we can hit a part of the water table that hasn't been affected by salt water," he said.

Contaminated water or sea water can be used for the drilling, and the same tubing that pumped it in can then be used to pump out the clean water.

"It's a simple technology," Schofield said. "It requires just simple tubes and a generator."

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Contributing: Associated Press