Dad, daughter in last embrace

PALU: For two days, Edi Setiawan helped pull the dead and the living out of a sea of mud and debris, all of them victims of one of Indonesia’s deadliest earthquakes in years.

And then, half-buried in the brown sludge, he saw two motionless bodies that broke his heart.

“I could see my father still embracing my sister,” Setiawan said Monday, recounting the devastating moment he found the pair entombed in mud near their home in the city of Palu.

“I just cried,” he said. “I was able to save other people, but I was unable to save my own family.”

Friday’s magnitude 7.5 quake killed more than 840 people and destroyed thousands of homes, triggering a humanitarian crisis with survivors now in desperate need of food, water and fuel.

Most of the casualties were caused by the quake itself and a deadly tsunami that slammed into the coastline around Palu. But hundreds of others were buried alive by a phenomenon called liquefaction, in which loose soil shaken by a quake gives way and collapses.

Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said Palu’s Petobo neighborhood, where Setiawan lived, was especially hard-hit. “There are still hundreds of victims buried in mud” in the area, he said.

On Monday, newly arrived rescue teams were confronting the behemoth task of trying to dig them out.

Palu, a city of 380,000 on the western coast of central Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, stood in ruins. Toppled cellphone towers have cut off communications, while downed power lines leave the city in darkness after the sun sets.