Sounds of silence accent misery in Indonesia

PALU, Indonesia — When rescuers arrived at the Roa Roa Hotel in central Palu, they could still hear the voices of guests trapped inside, calling out for help, after an earthquake caused the eight-story concrete structure to collapse.

But that was days ago.

Now, in much of the battered city and surrounding areas, there is only silence.

It has been a week since a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and a 20-foot tsunami devastated the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, killing more than 1,400 people in Palu and its vicinity. By Sunday night, Indonesian search and rescue teams at the Roa Roa Hotel were already describing the eerie quiet that had fallen over the rubble.

On Thursday, as rescuers dug their way through the city’s most-devastated neighborhoods, there were no urgent calls for help. It had been days since most rescuers heard such a cry.

There was what appeared to be a glimmer of hope late Thursday, when the French organization Pompiers de l’urgence, which has taken part in A man takes in all of the destruction around him as he sits in a chair Thursday in the shell of a house heavily damaged by the tsunami on the outskirts of Palu, on Sulawesi island in Indonesia.

rescue-and-recovery efforts, said that its high-tech sensors had “detected the presence of a victim” inside the collapsed fourstar Mercure Hotel in Palu, according to The Associated Press.

But hours later, the group could not confirm whether a survivor had been found.

In the neighborhoods with the worst destruction, there may never have been any cries for help. While buildings still stand in some parts of central Palu despite being shaken by the earthquake and slammed by the subsequent tsunami, one neighborhood, Petobo, is a vast sea of twisted debris.

Here, the land turned

to liquid — as the power of the earthquake turned soil into rolling waves that swallowed houses and buckled roadways — and rescuers are sure they will not find anyone alive. They are looking for bodies and have been for days. The Indonesian Red Cross described having to dig through silt as deep as 20 feet in the area.

On what were once city streets, a mix of mud and rubble is piled two stories high, with rebar and corrugated metal roofs tilted against crumbling concrete pillars.

Iris van Deinze, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent

societies, was traveling with one of the first groups of responders.

“When we arrived in Petobo, we found that it had been wiped off the map,” she said in a statement.

At dawn, before the recovery work begins for the day, everything is silent and still. But after about 9 a.m. Thursday, Petobo was A woman cries as she uses a cellphone recovered from her daughter, who was killed in the massive earthquake at Palu. The mother did not get the chance to see her daughter’s body, as it was buried in a mass grave.

transformed into a sea of activity, with hundreds of rescue workers descending on the neighborhood. They worked to clear paths through the area with a bulldozer, and then broke up into smaller groups and used rudimentary tools like pickaxes and shovels, or even just their hands.

When they get close to a body — sometimes pointed out by a

neighbor or passers-by who smelled decomposing flesh — they have to carefully navigate how to release it from the surrounding debris.

In the nearby neighborhood of Balaroa, rescuers wearing gloves carefully tried to remove the body of a young boy from the soil around him. Nearby, rescuers had found the body of a woman clutching a small child.