Rescuers giving up hope of finding quake survivors
Rescuers said hopes of finding more survivors from a devastating earthquake that killed more than 5,400 people were waning today, as aid workers from around the world arrived in the disaster zone in central Indonesia.
About 20 US Marines arrived on two military cargo planes in the historic city of Yogyakarta and unloaded heavy lifting machinery and a portable field hospital, as Malaysians, Chinese and Japanese joined Indonesian teams providing medical care and emergency supplies to some 200,000 people left homeless.
Most of the survivors of Saturday’s 6.3-magnitude quake were living in improvised shacks close to their former homes or in shelters erected in rice fields.
However, conditions had improved in two hospitals in the quake-zone, with no patients being treated outside or in the corridors like there were until recently.
In a worrying sign, nearby Mount Merapi, which has been belching gas and lava for weeks, shot out more large plumes of ash and debris. A scientist monitoring the peak blamed the heightened activity on the weekend quake, though other experts said that may not be the case.
The quake pounded tens of thousands of poorly-constructed homes into piles of bricks, tiles and wood in less than a minute, as many victims slept or were preparing breakfast.
The head of an emergency response team from Malaysia said it didn’t expect to find any more survivors or bodies under the rubble.
“The collapsed homes were all so small that anyone who was trapped would have been extracted by their family members,” said Superintendent Abdul Aziz Ahmad. He said his team had only found one body yesterday after searching in the worst-hit Bantul district.
Many survivors, who have endured several torrential rain storms and hours baking under the tropical sun, have complained of receiving little or no assistance.
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 received since the quake,” he said. “Of course it’s not enough for all of us, not even for a day.”
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono arrived in the area a few hours after the quake struck.
Yesterday, he acknowledged a “lack of co-ordination” in aid distribution and urged government officials to be “more agile”.
Yudhoyono’s efforts will likely come under intense domestic scrutiny because unlike other disasters in recent years in outlying regions, including the 2004 Asian tsunami, the quake occurred on Java island, home to almost half of the country’s 220 million people, including the bulk of the country’s ruling class.
“I don’t want this to become a political issue,” he said when asked about growing criticism by rival politicians of his response, perhaps sensing they might be able to use it to dent his popularity.
The government’s Social Affairs Ministry raised the official death toll to 5,427 today.
Some 22 countries have contributed or pledged assistance to the south-east 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 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.
| Related Stories: |
|
