Quake-hit villagers desperate for aid
A trickle of aid began reaching survivors of the Indonesian earthquake that killed more than 5,400 over the weekend, but desperate villagers said today the meagre deliveries were not enough.
“We have 300 families in this village and have only got two sacks of rice,” said Lastri, 27, begging beneath the blazing sun, a five-month-old baby in her arms. “It’s not enough.”
More aid was on the way today. A United Nations World Food Programme was due to arrive near the quake zone on Java island with high-energy biscuits and blankets, tents and generators.
Meanwhile, UN trucks travelled roads lined with increasingly desperate children, women and elderly people seeking handouts.
The US, which pledged €2m to the relief effort, said 100 military doctors and nurses also were on the way, carrying surgical, laboratory, dental and x-ray equipment.
But cracks in the runway at the region’s main airport caused by Saturday’s 6.3-magnitude quake and the poor condition of roads in the mountainous region were hampering aid-delivery efforts.
The government’s Social Affairs Ministry raised the official death toll to 5,427 early today.
The head of an emergency response team from Malaysia said it did not expect to find any more survivors or bodies under the rubble.
The government said about 200,000 people were homeless, most living in improvised shacks close to their former homes or in shelters erected in rice fields. Hospitals were overflowing with bloodied survivors.
In a worrying sign, a scientist studying nearby Mount Merapi, which has been belching gas and lava for weeks, said its volcanic activity had increased threefold since the quake.
Lava and hot clouds of gas were avalanching two and a half miles down the volcano’s slopes yesterday, said volcanologist Subandriyo.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited refugees and acknowledged a “lack of co-ordination” in aid distribution. He urged government officials to be “more agile”.
A plane chartered by Unicef, loaded with water, tents, stoves and cooking sets, arrived in Solo, a city about three hours’ drive from the hardest-hit district of Bantul. But officials said relief supplies remained inadequate.
In Jamprip, a village of 300 families, Edi Sutrisno, 37, helped unload a small supply of aid from a military truck: two bags of rice, nine boxes of dried noodles and two boxes of bottled water.
“It’s the first we’ve got since the quake,” he said. ”Of course it’s not enough for all of us, not even for a day.”
Some 22 countries have contributed or pledged assistance to the Asian country, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in Geneva. An emergency appeal by the global body is expected later this week.
The area affected by the quake stretches across hundreds of square miles of mostly farming communities to the south of Yogyakarta, large swathes still left without electricity.
The quake was the fourth destructive temblor to hit Indonesia in the past 17 months, including the one that spawned the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that left at least 216,000 dead or missing.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. It has 76 volcanos, the largest number in the world.
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