‘It sounded like bombs exploding. I saw the church moving away like a ship’
The class photo is a picture of happiness, with dozens of teenagers in crisp blue-and-white uniforms smiling brightly at the camera ahead of a weekend Bible camp in the picturesque village of Jono Oje, in the tropical countryside of northern Sulawesi.
Hours after it was taken, many of the students were dead, trapped and suffocated in a church that was wrenched from its foundation and driven more than three miles away by a wave of muddy sludge triggered by the earthquake that struck the Indonesian island last week.
Hala Tawasa, 50, lived beside the church and witnessed the horrific scene as her son carried her to safety from the ruins of their home.
“We had run out of the house when it began to shake,” she said. “But then the ground began to crack and mud began to spray up like fountains. It sounded like bombs exploding. I saw the church moving away like a ship,” she said. “My relatives, who later saw the bodies of the children, said that many of them were hugging.”
Close to 200 children were attending the Bible camp when the disaster occurred. More than 80 went missing and so far only 34 bodies have been recovered.
Gusti Bagus Andronicus, a local pastor, said one of his nephews had survived by swimming out of the mud and clinging to a coconut tree as the deadly torrent rushed by. But his eyes welled up as he described how he had found the bloated, blackened body of his other nephew, Gusti Bagus Agung Anugrah, in a hospital morgue. Like many of the victims, he was just 17.
When the terrifying 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocked Central Sulawesi last Friday, reducing multistorey buildings into a mangled mess, parents of the Bible class students were initially grateful that their children were out in the countryside of nearby Sigi province and unlikely to be hit by falling debris.
Nobody had accounted for the phenomenon of liquefaction, which happens when soil shaken by an earthquake behaves like liquid.
Seska Sumilaf, 48, whose daughter Gabriela, 17, was at the church, naturally began to worry after the quake shook the family’s home in the nearby town of Pula.
“The only thing that made me strong was the knowledge that she was not close to tall buildings. I didn’t think anything would happen to her in Jono Oje,” she said.
She immediately rang Gabriela, the youngest of her two children. “The first call connected but there was no answer, but I couldn’t even get a connection the second time,” she said. It was only the next day that Mrs Sumilaf heard the bad news from another parent and rushed to look for her daughter.
When she spoke to The Daily Telegraph, she was sheltering in the trees by a rubble-strewn patch of muddy wasteland where the ruins of the church and the remnants of another village had been violently spewed out by the mudflow.
The shell of the destroyed church had come crashing down on the village of Langaleso, three miles from its original location.
Maths and religious books containing teenage scrawls were scattered in the wreckage.
The 34 bodies were found spread across the field, floating on top of the mud, but Gabriela’s was not among them. Two cloth flags marked the spots where police rescuers thought two more corpses lay, but the recovery process has been painfully slow.
Six days after the disaster, the 150 rescue personnel are still being assisted by only one sniffer dog, said Surahman Gandari, the officer in charge. “We are still manually searching until equipment arrives.”
The official death toll for the earthquake, tsunami and mudslide combined stood at 1,424 yesterday, but is certain to rise as more bodies are recovered. Major factors in the delays to the rescue efforts were limited resources, the remote location and the challenging terrain after the violent mud-surge contorted the landscape
‘I tried to drive there, but then I saw how the road rose in waves, and I realised that my son was gone’
and upended roads, cutting off access to Jono Oje and Langaleso, explained Iris van Deinse, an International Federation of the Red Cross spokesman. Many of Sigi’s roads had been twisted into jagged slabs resembling fallen dominoes by the sheer force of the earthquake. Power cables and electricity pylons still lie collapsed over large fissures. A major access road to Jono Oje is accessible only by foot, jumping precariously over craters and muddy sludge.
But for mourning parents waiting under the blistering sun to identify their children’s bodies, the slow pace of the rescue efforts has been a source of painful frustration.
“I’m really sad and disappointed in the government,” said Mika Mantong, whose daughter Windy, 17, is still among the missing. “Windy was such a happy, outgoing girl who loved to sing. She was so excited to be going to the camp as she was the church worship leader,” he said.
After the quake, he jumped in his car to pick up his daughter but had to turn back because of the impassable roads. “When I saw that the access bridge to the village had been swept away I panicked,” he said.
Like Mrs Sumilaf, Markus Putra Pratama initially assumed last Friday night that his son Steven, a football and taekwondo fanatic, was fine.
“We weren’t too worried until a neighbour told us on Saturday that there had been a mudslide in Jono Oje,” he said. “I tried to drive there, but then I saw how the road rose in waves, and I realised that my son was gone.”
At one time Mr Pratama celebrated his thoughtful son’s dream to become a doctor. Now he only wants to see Steven’s body one last time.
He waits and hopes with other parents that the equipment will arrive on time before a government deadline to close search and rescue operations, allowing them to say a proper goodbye to their sons and daughters.