WORLD> Asia-Pacific
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WORLD> Asia-Pacific
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Survivors of Indonesian quake found; 3,000 missing
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-03 05:53 Elsewhere in the city, at the site of the former Ambacang Hotel where as many as 200 were feared trapped, rescue workers detected signs of life under a hill of tangled steel, concrete slabs and broken bricks of the five-story structure, said Gagah Prakosa, a spokesman of the rescue team.
"We heard some voices of people under the rubble, but as you can see the damage is making it very difficult to extricate them," Prakosa said, as a backhoe cleared the debris noisily. As the scale of the destruction became clearer, Vice President Jusuf Kalla told reporters in the capital, Jakarta, that the recovery operation would cost at least $400 million because the "impact of this disaster has worsened." Military and commercial planes shuttled in tons of emergency supplies, although rural areas remained cut off from help due to landslides that reportedly crushed several villages and killed nearly 300 people.
While the damage was most severe around Padang, a port city of 900,000, an Associated Press reporter saw virtually no remaining structures in the rural, hilly district of Pariaman, a community of about 370,000 people about 50 miles to the north. Landslides had wiped away roads and there was no sign of outside help, leaving locals on their own to clear roads of landslides and dig out bodies. Officials said more than 10,000 homes and buildings had been destroyed there. It was unclear how many died. At a makeshift center for the homeless, dozens took shelter under a 15-by-30 foot canopy donated by a local business. "We don't know where else to go," said Charlie, a local resident, who like many Indonesians uses a single name. "We need food and tents, but we haven't gotten any help yet." President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told a crowd of people whose relatives are missing to "please be patient," assuring them the government was doing everything in its power to save lives. "What can we do?" asked Rusdi Idram, burying his 25-year-old son Friday at a public Islamic cemetery as his wife stood by sobbing. "That was his fate. We have to accept and just surrender to Allah." Millions of dollars in aid and financial assistance came from Australia, Britain, China, Germany, Japan, the European Union, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Denmark and the United States, Indonesian officials said. Indonesia sits on a major geological fault zone and experiences dozens of quakes every year. Wednesday's quake originated on the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations.
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