Monuments to mark quake
Monuments and parks will be built over parts of Indonesia’s Palu as a solemn tribute to the thousands buried in a quaketsunami whose corpses will never be found, officials said on Monday.
Nearly 2,000 bodies have been recovered since the disaster on September 28, but authorities believe a further 5,000 may be entombed beneath the ruins.
The search will end on Thursday, officials say, when the worst-hit places will be sealed off, becoming mass graves containing unknown numbers of dead.
Memorials will be erected at Balaroa, Petobo and Jono Oge outside Palu where liquefaction – a phenomenon where the brute force of a quake turns soil to quicksand – engulfed entire villages.
“We will build a monument, and in the future we will create green spaces there,” provincial government spokesman Haris Kariming said in Palu.
The deadline gives family still searching for the missing just days to try to find their loved ones, and say goodbye.
In Balaroa, the news was too much to bear for Halimah Ariav Kobo, whose 25-year-old daughter Ummu Kalsum vanished in the disaster.
Squatting by debris where her daughter once lived, Kobo and her husband point to a filthy pool of black water and shattered concrete where they believe Ummu lies.
Rescuers had searched the area three times, she said, but found no trace of their daughter or her husband, who only married two months earlier.
“If they flatten this place to become a cemetery, what about all the bodies that have not been taken out?” Kobo said.
“I hope my child is found, in whatever condition. I want to take her home and bury her in a proper way.
“As a mother, I will not leave this place until the search is finished.”
Hopes of finding anyone alive have all but vanished.
But with days until the search is called off, family are more desperate than ever.
“Even if they stop looking, we will still try to find them ourselves,” Gopal said as he picked through rubble looking for his aunt and uncle.
“When we can no longer do it ourselves, we leave it to Allah,” the 40-year-old, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said.
Rescuers called off the search on Monday at Hotel Roa-Roa, which was reduced to a tangled mess by the force of the quake.
It emerged as an early focus of efforts to extract survivors after seven people were pulled out alive.
That optimism came to nothing, with efforts yielding only 27 bodies.
“The SAR operation at Hotel Roa-Roa has ended, because we have searched the entire hotel and have not found any more victims,” search and rescue field director in Palu, Bambang Suryo, said.
Authorities believed the 80-room hotel was near capacity when the district was ravaged by a 7.5 magnitude quake and tsunami and estimated 50 to 60 people could be trapped inside.