Quake toll tops 130...
The military said five planes carrying food, medicine, blankets, field tents and water tankers left Jakarta for the island early Wednesday.
A woman's body was recovered from the rubble of a collapsed mosque Wednesday morning in Bangsal district in the north of the island.
The national disaster agency's spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the death toll had risen to 131 from Tuesday’s 105. There are fears the death toll will rise as workers with heavy machinery claw through the rubble of homes, schools and mosques, with hopes of finding any survivors fading.
"The efforts to evacuate people have been intensified but there are still a lot of problems on the ground," Nugroho added.
Nearly 2,500 people have been hospitalized with serious injuries and more than 156,000 people are displaced due to the extensive damage to thousands of homes.
Authorities said all the tourists who wanted to be evacuated from three outlying vacation islands due to power blackouts and damage to hotels had left by boat, some 5,000 people in all.
“We have limited human resources. Some paramedics have to be at the shelters, some need to be mobile," Muhammad Zainul Majdi, the governor of West Nusa Tenggara province which covers Lomboktold AFP.
"The scale of this quake is massive for us here in West Nusa Tenggara, this is our first experience,"Majdi revealed.
Destroyed completely
Across much of the island, oncebustling villages have been turned into virtual ghost towns.
"In some villages we visited the destruction was almost 100 percent, all houses collapsed, roads are cracked and bridges were broken," said Arifin Muhammad Hadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian Red Cross.
Makeshift encampments have popped up on the side of roads and rice fields, with many farmers reluctant to move far from their damaged homes and leave precious livestock behind.
"It's typical of earthquake victims in Indonesia, they want to stay close to their livelihood, they can't bring their livestock to the shelters," Hadi said.
The tremor struck as evening prayers were being said across the Muslim-majority island and there are fears that one collapsed mosque in north Lombok had been filled with worshippers.