Help On The Way

At the Paris headquarters of cementmaker Lafarge Group on Dec. 26, the devastation ran deep. The firm had a plant in Lho Nga, Indonesia, 25 km west of Banda Aceh, perilously close to the earthquake’s epicenter off Sumatra. A killer wave destroyed the plant’s 35 buildings as well as a seaside complex that housed 100 local employees and their families. As of last week, Lafarge had accounted for only 294 of its 625 workers based at the plant.

The company responded quickly. A day after the disaster, a Lafarge team based in Indonesia flew search, rescue and medical personnel to Banda Aceh to hunt for the missing and care for survivors. The team brought 450 employees and their kin to emergency relief centers and hired trucks and planes to ship food, water and medicine to the area. The Paris headquarters donated €767,000 to affected countries, and continues to collect contributions from its 75,000 employees around the world. It will soon dispatch a team to plan the rebuilding of the Lho Nga plant and nearby villages. “It’s a human challenge of massive scale,” says Alain Guillen, vice president for social policies at Lafarge.

Across Europe, corporations and individuals have stepped up to aid a stricken region where they have been working and playing for generations, and with which they feel a strong bond. They’ve pledged tens of millions of euros, millions of doses of drugs, and the people and equipment needed to reconstruct damaged infrastructure.

On Dec. 30, Christopher Bland, chairman of the U.K. telecommunications group BT, began phoning top executives at Britain’s 20 largest companies to urge them to donate to the relief effort, but he soon gave up because so many of those he called had already made large pledges. “I think it’s an unprecedented response in terms of corporate giving,” Bland told Time. “It’s really struck a chord.” BT has sent seven telephone engineers to Indonesia; another six leave this week. The company also donated $934,000 to Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee and provided 150 volunteers to answer the charity consortium’s phones.

Among Europe’s biggest corporate donors is Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which wrote a check to a relief fund for €10 million. Deeply moved upon his return from flood-damaged regions of India on Jan. 4, chief executive Josef Ackermann learned that the bank’s employees had already collected more than €1 million in donations. “I proposed to the board that in this extreme situation, let us do something extraordinary,” Ackermann says. “Let’s top off the employee donations so that Deutsche Bank as a whole can make a donation of €10 million.”

German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp AG, which has units in India and Thailand, says it will spend up to €2.5 million rebuilding hard-hit villages in Madras, India, and near Khao Lak beach in Phuket, Thailand. The company will also build an orphanage in each country and secure financing for the psychological care of youngsters there. “We want to show that we feel connected to these countries in which we have been active for decades,” says ThyssenKrupp CEO Ekkehard Schulz. British American Tobacco’s Sri Lankan division, Ceylon Tobacco Company, has pledged to rebuild a destroyed village, too. British American Tobacco plans to announce a substantial cash contribution to the relief drive this week.

Companies whose products or services are desperately needed in affected countries — from drugmakers to utility companies — have come forward with in-kind contributions. French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis’ CEO Jean-François Dehecq personally made one such delivery. He and French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy accompanied 70,000 cases of antibiotic, antibacterial and antidiarrheal drugs on an aid flight to Sri Lanka. Sanofi is donating a further €1 million to relief charities.

Sanofi-Aventis’ British competitor GlaxoSmithKline, which lost two vacationing employees in the disaster, is giving $3.8 million and more than 2 million doses of drugs, and is prepared to donate 600,000 vials of vaccines to relief operations. Swedish truckmaker Scania — whose country may have suffered Europe’s highest death toll in the 404 Not Found

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) disaster: 52 known dead and 637 still missing — donated five trucks and made equipment loans and other contributions valued at $2 million, all of which went to Indonesia for reconstruction in northern Sumatra. “This is a big catastrophe for people living in the region and it’s our way of showing our involvement,” says Scania chief financial officer Jan Gurander.

Mobile-phone company Vodafone Group donated $1.7 million to relief groups, and $187,000 to Télécoms sans Frontières, which installs mobile networks in areas blighted by disaster and war, and MapAction, which performs satellite mapping to facilitate logistical support. French electricity company EDF gave €1 million to relief charities as well as in-kind support to Electriciens sans Frontières, which is sending 15 electricians and more than 50 diesel-fueled generators to help restore power in Sumatra and Sri Lanka.

Aid groups have been heartened by the outpouring of corporate generosity. Oxfam International’s British chapter has been so overwhelmed by donations that it’s still counting the money. “The response this time from corporations has been much larger than usual,” says spokeswoman Anna Mitchell. But with the tsunami-torn countries facing a long, slow, painful recovery, Oxfam and other groups hope this first wave of help won’t be the last.