Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)

■ The deadly Indonesian earthquake lifted the island it struck by as much as 10 inches, scientists said.

- By Andi Jatmiko and Stephen Wright

TANJUNG, Indonesia — Scientists say the powerful Indonesian earthquake that killed nearly 400 people lifted the island it struck by as much as 10 inches.

The National Disaster Mitigation Agency said on Saturday that 387 people died, jumping from the 321 it reported the previous day, as search and rescue teams continued to sift through the rubble and people already buried by relatives are accounted for.

Using satellite images of Lombok from the days after the Aug. 5 quake, scientists from NASA and the California Institute of Technology’s joint rapid imaging project made a ground deformatio­n map and measured changes in the island’s surface.

In the northwest of the island near the epicenter, the rupturing fault line lifted the earth by a quarter of a meter. In other places it dropped by 2 to 6 inches.

NASA said satellite observatio­ns can help authoritie­s respond to earthquake­s and other natural or man-made disasters.

Almost 390,000 people, about 10 percent of Lombok’s population, are homeless or displaced after the earthquake.

Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said three districts in the north of Lombok still haven’t received any assistance. The governor of West Nusa Tenggara province, which includes Lombok, has extended the official emergency period by two weeks to Aug. 25.

“It’s estimated the death toll will continue to grow because there are still victims who are suspected of being buried by landslides and collapsed buildings and there are deaths that have not been recorded,” Nugroho said.

The number of evacuees fluctuates, he said, because not all evacuee points have been counted and some people tend to their gardens and properties during the day and return to the tent camps at night.

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