INDONESIA TO END SEARCH FOR VICTIMS ON THURSDAY
Death toll rises to 1,763 and 5,000 believed missing, say officials
INDONESIAN rescue workers will stop searching for the bodies of victims of an earthquake and tsunami on the island of Sulawesi on Thursday, the national disaster mitigation agency said yesterday.
The announcement came after the official death toll from the 7.5magnitude quake and a tsunami it triggered on Sept 28 rose to 1,763.
Officials also said the number of people believed missing has soared to 5,000.
Bodies are still being recovered, especially from the ruins of buildings in the small city of Palu and from neighbourhoods hit by liquefaction, a phenomenon that turns the ground into a roiling quagmire, in the south of city.
“Evacuation stops on Oct 11,” the national disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said.
“Victims who have not been found are declared missing,” he said.
Some limited searching might still be undertaken but largescale searches with many personnel and heavy equipment would cease, he said.
Many hundreds of people are still buried in mud and debris in the south of here, where neighbourhoods were obliterated by liquefaction and desperate relatives have been seeking help to find loved ones.
Dozens of rescuers removed 34 bodies from one place on Saturday.
Sutopo said the debris would be removed from those places and they would be turned into public spaces like parks and sports venues. Surveys would be carried out and people living in areas vulnerable to liquefaction would be moved.
“We don’t want the community to be relocated to such dangerous places,” he said.
Most of the dead have been found here, the region’s main urban centre.
Figures for more remote areas, some just re-connected to the outside world by road, are trickling in. The heaviest casualties appear to have been in Palu.
Sulawesi is one of Indonesia’s five main islands and, like the others, is exposed to frequent earthquakes and tsunamis.
In 2004, a quake off Acheh in Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean that killed 226,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.
Earlier on Sunday, dozens of Christians gathered outside ruined churches for open-air services to give thanks for their survival and to mourn members of their congregation killed in the disaster.
Indonesia has the world’s biggest Muslim population but there are Christian communities throughout the archipelago, including in Palu.
“We are so relieved to be alive but sad because so many of our congregation died,” said Dewi Febriani, a 26-year-old economics student, after a service in a tent set up outside the Toraja Church in Jono Oge village, just south of Palu.
Jono Oge was particularly hard hit by liquefaction.
Dozens of teenagers at a nearby church and Bible camp were killed. Many of their bodies lie buried in the mud.
A big aid operation is gearing up to help hard-hit communities where some 70,000 people have been displaced.