Battle to find dead kin
EARTHQUAKE AFTERMATH: VILLAGERS SEARCH HILLS OF MUD AND DEBRIS
Anger and despair mounts as rescuers arrive six days after devastating event.
Aweek after a major earthquake brought devastation to Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, Hasnah has trouble remembering all the dead relatives she’s trying to find in the tangled expanse of mud and debris that used to be her neighbourhood.
Hasnah, 44, is from Petobo, a village on the outskirts of the city of Palu, where last Friday’s 7.5-magnitude earthquake triggered a phenomenon called soil liquefaction, which turned the ground into a churning sea of mud.
“More than half of my family are gone,” Hasnah said, sobbing. “I can’t even count how many. Two of my children, my cousins, my sister, my brother-in-law and their children, all gone.”
The official death toll from the quake and tsunami it triggered is 1 558, but it will certainly rise as more bodies are recovered in Palu, where most of the dead have been counted. Figures for more remote areas, some still cut off, are only trickling in.
No one knows how many people were dragged to their deaths in the roiling quagmire in Petobo and nearby areas south of Palu, which were particularly hard hit by liquefaction. The national disaster agency says 1 700 homes in one neighbourhood alone were swallowed up and hundreds of people killed.
“I saw our homes being sucked into the earth,” said Hasnah who. like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.
Hasnah is furious that a search and rescue operation in her area only began on Thursday. “I’m so disappointed. They said they would come with the heavy machines but they didn’t. They lied.”
Sick of waiting for help, villagers were searching themselves, she said. “We’ve marked bodies with sticks. You can see a foot sticking out, but there’s no one to dig them out.” – Reuters