Indonesia rushes to aid victims as deaths climb
Neighbors, including China offer help after earthquake, tsunami
PALU, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities scrambled on Monday to get aid and rescue equipment to earthquake- and tsunami-hit Sulawesi island and started to bury some of the more than 1,200 dead, as shaken survivors streamed away from their ruined homes in search of food and shelter.
The death toll, given by the national disaster management agency on Monday, looked certain to rise as rescuers reached devastated outlying communities hit on Friday by a magnitude-7.5 earthquake and subsequent tsunami waves as high as 6 meters.
Dozens of people were reported to be trapped in the rubble of several hotels and a mall in the small city of Palu, 1,500 kilometers northeast of Jakarta, with hundreds more feared buried in landslides that engulfed villages.
President Joko Widodo told reporters that getting people out was a priority.
“The evacuation is not finished yet; there are many places where evacuation couldn’t be done because of the absence of heavy equipment. But last night equipment started to arrive,” Widodo said.
“We’ll send as much food as possible today with Hercules planes, directly from Jakarta,” he said, referring to C-130 military transport aircraft.
Officials said the government had accepted supplies that are badly needed by the survivors, including tents, water treatment facilities, generators and medical supplies. Other items have been offered as well.
China, Australia, Thailand, the United States and the European Union have offered help.
The national search and rescue agency said a 25-yearold woman was rescued overnight in the Palu neighborhood of Balaroa, where houses were swallowed up as a result of soil liquefaction caused by the quake. A number of other survivors were being located and a few were being pulled from buildings in different locations.
Most of the confirmed deaths were in Palu, a city of about 380,000 people, where authorities began burying bodies on Monday in a mass grave with space for more than a thousand.
And in Donggala, aid worker Lian Gogali, who had reached the district by motorcycle, said hundreds of people facing a lack of food and medicine were trying to get out, but evacuation teams had yet to arrive and roads were blocked.
“It’s devastating,” she said. Sulawesi is one of the nation’s five main islands and sits astride a number of fault lines. Numerous aftershocks have rattled the region.
Fuel and rice
Pictures showed expanses of splintered wood, washedup cars and trees mashed together, with rooftops and roads split.
Officials said rescuers need heavy equipment to shift slabs of broken concrete, but access to many areas has been hampered by damaged roads, landslides and collapsed bridges.
A witness said queues at petrol stations on the approaches to Palu stretched for several kilometers. Convoys carrying food, water and fuel headed toward the city as some residents left.
The state energy company said it was airlifting 4,000 liters of fuel, while Indonesia’s logistics agency said it would send hundreds of tons of rice. Police were providing escorts for aid convoys to prevent the theft of supplies.
The government has allocated $37.6 million for disaster recovery.
Military aircraft were sent to bring people out of Palu, where crowds of people clutching bags and boxes were waiting at the airport, military official Bambang Sudewo told Metro TV.
It was hoped that up to 1,500 people could be taken out every day, with children, women and the injured the priority, he said.
Media footage showed chaotic scenes with officers struggling to keep order.
Indonesia, which is on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, is all too familiar with earthquakes and tsunamis. A quake in 2004 triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean that killed 226,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.