Survivor digs ‘hard’ to find his home

PALU, INDONESIA • Munif Umayar, a survivor of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the city of Palu, took up a laborious search for his house Wednesday in the ruins of the Balaroa neighbourhood.

After a long hunt, and hard digging, he finally found it — at least 150 metres from where he guessed he used to live.

That was the power of the earthquake, turning the ground into jelly in a deadly churn that eradicated landmarks and sent buildings flowing sideways even as they were being sucked down into rubble.

“I had to dig hard to know that this was my house,” said Munif, a 50-year-old businessman.

“When I found it, I put a flag on it, as a sign.”

He fears his brother was trapped inside.

Balaroa is a middle-class collection of housing developments in Palu and it is the centre of some of the worst damage from the quake.

In the midst of a disaster that killed with both water and earth, Balaroa sustained almost no damage from the ensuing tsunami.

Instead, the neighbourhood was laid waste when the quake caused a phenomenon known as liquefaction that weakens waterlogged soil. It can swallow and topple buildings or carry them away in ribbons of spongy earth.

“Things start to fly around, houses start to slide,” said Adam Switzer, a scientist at the Singapore-based Earth Observatory.

Once that happens, he said, there’s little you can do to escape.

“Unfortunately, you are a passenger and you are along for the ride,” he said.

While the death toll reached at least 1,424 on Thursday it is expected to rise because some victims were entombed in the slurry of soil, rocks and mud caused by liquefaction.

In one part of Balaroa, liquefaction undermined and destroyed at least 1,747 homes.

It is now a vast wasteland of debris. Rooftops are all that remain of many houses.

The minaret of a mosque, leaning precariously to one side, is one of the few structures still standing.

Many bodies are thought to still be buried under rubble in places like Balaroa.

The bodies were there, locals knew, because of the smell. As crews dug into the earth in one obliterated corner of Balaroa, a woman’s arm became visible, then her head.

Pushing away rebar and concrete, the workers found more: a small child, clutching to her in their last moments.

In the devastated neighbourhood, demolished buildings were covered in layers of corrugated iron roofing.

Buckled rods and downed electric pylons jutted out.

Cars and vehicles stuck up at improbable angles.