MILFORD — Amid the bustle of his workday at Alarcon Tire, the young Burmese immigrant wiped the grease from his hands and took a moment to check the Internet — his only bridge between his life in the United States and loved ones in his devastated homeland. The photos he saw of crushed homes, downed trees and flooding in Myanmar made an eerie contrast to the peaceful humming of car maintenance in the Bridgeport Avenue garage, where waiting customers quietly flipped magazines.

"There's no communication right now. Whole cities are broken — no Internet," said Phone, a political dissident targeted for death in his homeland by the military junta that swept to power in a coup more than four decades ago. "I call every day," said Phone, whose full name is not being disclosed because he fears for his family's safety if his whereabouts surface. "Telephone lines are broken. It's so bad. Everything's gone, totally gone. Now what you see is just water."

The 35-year-old has been wracked by worry since Saturday when the storm devastated the Southeast Asian nation, once known as Burma and now called Myanmar. The cyclone is believed to have killed at least 23,000 people, with some estimates as high as 100,000, and left more than 42,000 missing. He hasn't been able to contact his parents, brother or cousins. He doesn't even know if they are alive. His parents and brother live in Yangon, Myanmar's main city, which was badly damaged by the cyclone. His cousins live in a village

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he believes was destroyed.

Phone sought political asylum in the U.S. nine years ago after the junta "tried to kill me," and now lives in Naugatuck with his wife and two children.

United Nations officials have estimated as many as 1 million Burmese are homeless, and relief agencies fear that lack of safe food and drinking water could push the death toll above 100,000 while Myanmar's military junta drags its feet in allowing international aid.

He isn't the only one trying to reach family members, said Mike Kiernan, a spokesman for Save the Children. Unfortunately, "right now it's too chaotic" for the Westport-based humanitarian aid organization to help him, Kiernan said, adding that it may be possible after things quiet down a bit.

"Bodies and animals and destroyed buildings ... it's a disaster of enormous proportions," he said.

Save the Children, one of four major relief agencies working in Myanmar, has distributed 30 tons of materials to 50,000 people there and has raised more than $600,000 in the past 36 hours toward its goal of $10 million to provide more help, he said.

The agency had stored food, water, plastic sheeting for shelter and medicine in the country, where it has some 500 workers who are mostly Burmese, in case of emergency.

But Kiernan estimated Save the Children will run out of its pre-positioned supplies in the next couple of days and is still awaiting visa approval for more aid workers.

Clean drinking water is the most critical need over the next 10 days, he said, to prevent waterborne diseases. To donate to the relief effort, go to www.savethechildren.org.

Other organizations doing cyclone relief work include World Vision, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and CARE.

Meanwhile, Phone is working and waiting at Alarcon, where he's been for eight years, knowing photos are all he can see of his homeland while the junta rules.

A supporter of National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Phone fought against the oppressive ruling junta and was in and out of prison, he said.

"I am a criminal in my country," he said.

The Associated Press reported that Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is living without electricity under house arrest in Yangon after the cyclone, and activists wrote fresh graffiti on overpasses, including "X" marks — a symbol for voting "no" in a referendum Saturday on a new military-backed constitution.

Voting has been postponed until May 24 in Yangon, some outlying areas and parts of the delta heavily damaged by the storm.