Thousands missing after earthquake devastates countryside and rescue workers begin to look for bodies rather than survivors
Ben Doherty and Peter Beaumont The Observer,
Sunday 4 October 2009
Rescue workers look for survivors inside the Ambacan Hotel. Photograph: Nicky Loh/Reuters
Rescue workers reported yesterday that entire villages had been sucked under the earth after the the devastating earthquake that hammered western Sumatra, estimating that at last 600 people had lost their lives in the countryside surrounding Pandang.
The dead included those attending a large wedding party numbering several hundreds. If the figure is confirmed, it would bring the total death toll to above 1,300. More than 3,000 people were listed as missing before the news about the villages emerged.
In Pandang itself, a colonial-era hotel became the national focus for hopes that survivors might still be found .
In dramatic scenes, rescuers dug for eight guests and staff rumoured to be alive in the wreckage of the city's Ambacang hotel.
At the hotel, a prominent landmark in the university town of 900,000, the rescue efforts were inspired by a text message sent by a victim to his family on Friday. The message, delivered as rescue workers attempted to burrow their way through rubble and masonry, said simply: "Be careful that the excavator doesn't cause the building to collapse on us."
The once grand, 140-room hotel complex was destroyed by the earthquake, but relatives and locals gathered outside as rescuers searched among the rubble for the survivors they believed could be trapped between the fifth and sixth floors. Jul, who worked as a waiter in the hotel's restaurant downstairs, said he did not believe anyone could still be alive in the wreckage. "I think seven people I know are inside. Inside somewhere. Alive? I don't think so," he said.
The cavity of the KFC restaurant on the ground floor remained largely untouched. Tables still stood and food, abandoned in panic, still sat on them. "We estimate there are still eight people trapped alive under Ambacang Hotel," Colonel Boy Rafli Amar told reporters. "We are still trying hard to evacuate them," Private Harmen told the Observer. He believed the operation had moved from rescue to recovery. "The last text message was at 5pm yesterday. I do not think they are alive any more."
In the countryside, as rescuers finally reached remoter areas, they discovered that at least three villages had disappeared.
Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry's crisis centre, said yesterday that the villages of Pulau Aiya, Lubuk Lawe and Jumena had been wiped out by the landslides. "They were sucked 30m deep into the earth," Pakaya said of the 400 people missing in the village of Pulau Aiya, where the wedding party was being celebrated. "Even the mosque's minaret, taller than 20m, disappeared." He said about 244 others were buried in Lubuk Lawe and Jumena villages. Only 26 bodies had been extricated.
An Associated Press photographer who flew over the Pariaman district in a helicopter saw several landslides in the area. At one, a giant section of a hillside had been swept away and the remains of destroyed houses protruded from the mud. Roads were gone and trees had been uprooted and swept downhill.
Asked about rescue efforts in the town of Pariaman and the surrounding villages, Indonesia's vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, was blunt, stating that the effort was now about retrieving bodies. "We can be sure that they are dead. So now we are waiting for burials," he said.
"Don't bother trying to bring aid up there," said Afiwardi, the resident of one flattened village, who pointed past a landslide that cut off a road. "Everyone is dead." With hope running out, hard decisions have to be made. Teams from Switzerland, Britain, Turkey, the US, Australia, Korea and Japan are searching destroyed homes and buildings along the western coast of Sumatra, co-ordinated by a UN operations centre, which has been established in the provincial governor's residence.
John Holland, a member of a British rescue team, said yesterday officials had gone to Padang airport to "turn [new international rescue] crews around when they land. There's just no facilities here for them, no capacity for them to stay here and there's no work for them to do. There's a whole lot of search and rescue crews here with no work to do.
"A Turkish team is to the north searching villages that have already been searched and everybody accounted for. It's terrific that so many countries are volunteering their assistance, and the people and the government here are grateful, but there's no reason for them to be here now."
The focus is now moving to the aid effort to help the displaced. "We have not received a thing. We need food, clothes, blankets, milk. It seems like the government has forgotten about us," said Siti Armaini, sitting outside her collapsed home in Pariaman, about 25 miles north of Padang and nearer to the quake's epicentre.
Testos, an Indonesian Red Cross worker at an aid station in central Padang, said they had half what they needed. "We also need drinking water and clothes, because many people's clothes were burnt in fires," he said. "We also need medicines to stop infection."
An Australian naval vessel has set sail for Sumatra with a 40-bed hospital with surgical facilities and helicopters, the country's defence ministry said.
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