Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Aid just getting to some days after Lombok quake
KAYANGAN, Indonesia — Falling rubble paralyzed Mary Andoni from the waist down when Indonesia was shaken by one of its deadliest earthquakes in years. But there was nobody in her destroyed village to get her the help she needed. There were too many other injured and dead.
“It was overwhelming,” Andoni’s 35-year-old brother-in-law, Ilham, said of the chaotic aftermath of Sunday’s magnitude 7.0 quake on the island of Lombok. “There was no way to get her out.”
On Thursday, paramedics evacuated Andoni to a hospital in the city of Mataram. But her story underscores the challenges facing this devastated region: Four days after the earthquake killed hundreds of people and displaced 270,000 more, injured survivors in remote areas cut off by landslides and broken bridges are still emerging from the ruined countryside, struggling to reach the doctors they desperately need. And the crisis is not over. Lombok has been hit by more than 300 aftershocks, including a 5.9 magnitude tremor Thursday that brought down more buildings and injured 24 more people, authorities said.
In northern Lombok, some people leaped from their vehicles on a trafficjammed road when the aftershock hit, while an elderly woman standing in the back of a pickup wailed “God is Great.”
At a first aid station in Kayangan that was set up under a sprawling tent because of the threat of more quakes, Dr. Mohammad Akbar said medical staff were combing the region with an ambulance to find injured people.
By 3 p.m., he said, they had found and treated 40 people with broken bones, cuts and bruises. Many were also dehydrated.
“They’re all stuck in isolated areas with little or no transport,” Akbar said. “They’re too weak to get here on their own, so we need to go to them.”
Because the nearest hospital — located an hour’s drive away in Tanjung — was wrecked by the quake, Akbar’s aid station is referring patients to an Indonesian naval ship now docked at an empty port on the coast.
Navy Col. Andi Abdullah, an orthopedic surgeon stationed on the vessel, said military doctors had received 46 survivors and performed surgery on 16.
Two of the ship’s wards were filled by patients lying on stretchers with IV drips in their arms. Outside, in the hallways, family members who accompanied them sat barefoot on mats, staring blankly at the ship’s walls.
“Their physical wounds are easy to treat. But their psychological wounds are much harder to heal, especially for those who lost loved ones,” Abdallah said.
Abdallah said several of the patients had waited to seek medical help because they had run high into the hills fearing the quake would spawn a tsunami, and stayed there for days.
Akbar’s aid station is the only one in the vicinity.
One 9-year-old girl who had been brought there by her father closed her eyes and screamed in pain as the paramedic wrapped white gauze around splints that ran the length of her broken leg.
“Does it hurt, is this too tight?” the medical worker asked.
“It hurts,” the girl replied. “It hurts so much.”