The death toll in Indonesia’s quake-tsunami disaster nearly doubled to more than 800 on Sunday, as ill-equipped rescuers struggled to reach scores of trapped victims, health officials resorted to mass burials and desperate residents looted shops for food and water.
“The casualties will keep increasing,” said national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, whose agency announced 832 deaths. “Today we will start the mass burial of victims, to avoid the spread of disease.” Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said the final death toll in the north of Sulawesi island could be in the “thousands” since many regions have still not been reached.
“It feels very tense,” said 35-year-old mother Risa Kusuma, comforting her feverish baby boy at an evacuation centre in the gutted coastal city of Palu.
“Every minute an ambulance brings in bodies. Clean water is scarce. The mini-markets are looted everywhere.”
Indonesia’s Metro TV on Sunday broadcast footage from a coastal community in Donggala, close to the epicentre of the quake. Some waterfront homes appeared crushed but a resident said most people fled to higher ground after the quake struck. “When it shook really hard, we all ran up into the hills,” a man identified as Iswan told the TV.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo arrived in the region on Sunday afternoon.
In Palu on Sunday aid was trickling in, the Indonesian military had been deployed and search-and-rescue workers were doggedly combing the rubble for survivors — looking for dozens feared trapped under one hotel alone.
“Communication is limited, heavy machinery is limited... It’s not enough for the numbers of buildings that collapsed,” Nugroho said. The 7.5-magnitude quake struck Friday, sparking a tsunami that ripped apart the city’s coastline.
Save The Children program director Tom Howells said access was a “huge issue” hampering relief efforts.
“Aid agencies and local authorities are struggling to reach several communities around Donggala, where we are expecting there to be major damage and potential large-scale loss of life,” Howells said.
Dozens of corpses lay in an open courtyard at the back of a Palu hospital, baking under a fierce tropical sun, with only one building separating it from an open triage site on the opposite side. “I have one child — he’s missing,” Baharuddin, a 52-year-old Palu resident, told AFP as he stood on floor tiles smeared with blood.
“I last spoke to him before he went to school in the morning.” The disaster agency said it believed about 71 foreigners were in Palu when the quake struck, with most safe.
Three French nationals and a South Korean, who may have been staying at a flattened hotel, had not yet been accounted for, it added.
Amid the levelled trees, overturned cars, concertinaed homes and flotsam tossed up to 50 metres inland, survivors and rescuers struggled to come to grips with the scale of the disaster.