UK sends £2m in aid as Indonesia death toll could reach thousands
BRITAIN has sent a team of experts and £2million in humanitarian aid to Indonesia, amid fears that deaths from the devastating earthquake and tsunami could rise into the thousands.
International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said yesterday that the UK had been asked for help.
The announcement came after a 7.5 magnitude quake triggered a tsunami last Friday with 20ft waves that rocked the island of Sulawesi, killing hundreds and leaving thousands homeless.
The death toll, said to be 1,200 at the weekend, is currently confirmed at 844, but it is thought thousands more people are buried under mud or collapsed buildings.
Disease
The full extent of the disaster is not yet known, with teams lacking heavy lifting machinery battling to restore roads to remote areas where people are trapped and to search the ruins of collapsed structures.
Last night it was revealed that none of the country’s tsunami detectors were working before Sulawesi was hit.
The country appealed for international help as it struggled to cope with the sheer scale of the devastation.
Ms Mordaunt said: “I have made an initial £2million of aid support available to help meet the immediate needs of the most vulnerable people.”
British aid workers will help co-ordinate efforts on the ground.
Mass graves are now being dug in a bid to prevent an outbreak of disease. The Indonesian government believes nearly 50,000 have been left homeless and around 1.5 million people have been affected.
Among the dead were 34 children attending a Christian camp at a church that was engulfed in mud and rubble in Sigi, to the south of the island’s main city Palu.
Survivors have been forced to loot shops for food and water, saying aid has not yet reached them. Others search open-air morgues in the baking sun looking for loved ones. Meanwhile, questions have been raised over why tsunami warning systems failed to alert communities in the earthquake-prone region.
Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency has confirmed that none of the country’s tsunami detector buoys were working.
Vandals
Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the floating detection units – which are connected to deep sea sensors – had been damaged by vandals or stolen.
A warning that was sent appears to have drastically underestimated the scale of the waves, while people in Palu did not receive alerts due to power cuts caused by the tremor. According to reports, sirens did not sound along the coast and there were no warnings from police via loudspeaker vans.
On December 26, 2004, a major tsunami in south-east Asia triggered by a 9.2 magnitude earthquake off the western coast of Northern Sumatra killed 230,000 people and hit 14 countries.
Afterwards a concerted international effort was launched to improve tsunami warning systems, particularly in the Indian Ocean.