Hope fades as bodies mount

INDONESIA: DEATH TOLL RISES AS SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS TURNS TO ACCOUNTING FOR DEAD

Rescue operation at 80-room hotel ends with 50 to 60 people feared trapped inside.

Palu

Nearly 2 000 bodies have been recovered from Indonesia’s disaster-ravaged Palu city, an official said yesterday, after a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

The death toll from the twin disaster on Sulawesi island that erased whole suburbs in Palu has reached 1 944, said local military spokesperson M Thohir.

“That number is expected to rise, because we have not received orders to halt the search for bodies,” said Thohir, who is also a member of the government’s official Palu quake taskforce.

Authorities have said as many as 5 000 are believed missing in two hard-hit areas since the September 28 disaster – indicating far more may have perished than the current toll.

Hopes of finding anyone alive have faded and the search for survivors amid the wreckage has turned to accounting for the dead.

The disaster agency said the official search for the unaccounted would continue until Thursday, at which point they would be listed as missing, presumed dead.

But rescuers called off the search yesterday at Hotel RoaRoa, which was reduced to a tangled mess of twisted rebar and smashed concrete by the force of the quake.

The hotel emerged as an early focus of efforts to extract survivors, with seven people pulled alive from its mangled ruins in the immediate aftermath.

But nobody else was saved as the days passed, and optimism faded as corpses surfaced.

“The search and rescue (SAR) operation at the hotel has ended, because we have searched the entire hotel and have not found any more victims,” Bambang Suryo, SAR field director in Palu, said.

Agus Haryono, another SAR official at the scene who confirmed the search was off, said 27 bodies were recovered from the hotel, including three pulled from the debris on Sunday.

Among the confirmed dead were five paragliders in Palu for a competition, including an Asian Games athlete and a South Korean, the only known foreign victim.

Authorities believed the 80room hotel was near capacity when the district was ravaged by a 7.5 magnitude quake and estimated 50 to 60 people could be trapped inside. –

Picture:Reuters PICKING UP PIECES. An excavator removes a damaged car next to the debris of a mosque damaged by an earthquake in the Balaroa neighbourhood in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.