Grieving quake survivors scavenged for food in the debris of their houses on Sunday and pleaded for aid, as the world promised to help Indonesia recover from the latest in a string of deadly natural disasters.
By nightfall, the death toll from the magnitude 6,3 quake had reached more than 4 300 people, officials said. Thousands of injured were still being treated in hospitals overflowing with bloodied patients and piles of debris.
Rescue workers dug desperately through rubble for survivors. Thousands of troops and emergency rescue teams joined volunteers who clawed at debris with their bare hands.
In hardest-hit Bantul district south of the provincial capital Yogyakarta, the stench of bodies filled the air as soldiers used a backhoe to dig through the rubble in one neighbourhood that was completely levelled by the temblor.
The top priority in the flattened district was to ”evacuate victims still trapped in the rubble, using heavy equipment,” said Gendut, a provincial health official.
Torrential rain that fell late on Sunday added to the misery of the roughly 200 000 people made homeless, most of whom were living in makeshift shelters constructed from plastic, canvas or cardboard.
”So far no one from the government has shown any care for us,” said Brojo Sukardi in a village in Bantul where almost all houses had been pounded into piles of rubble, wood and tiles. ”Please tell people to help us.”
Saturday’s quake was the fourth destructive temblor to hit Indonesia in the last 17 months, including the monster that spawned the Asian tsunami on 26 December 2004 that killed 230 000 people, most of them in Indonesia.
The country is also battling a spiraling human bird flu case load, a spate of terror attacks by al-Qaeda linked Islamic militants and the threat of eruption from Mount Merapi, just north of the quake zone.
The area affected by Saturday’s quake stretched across hundreds of square kilometres of mostly farming communities to the south of the ancient city of Yogyakarta.
”I have to start my life from zero again,” said Poniran, whose five-year-old daughter Ellie was killed in the quake.
Poniran dug up his still-breathing daughter from the rubble of her bedroom, but she died in a hospital awaiting treatment along with hundreds of others.
”Her last words were ‘Daddy, Daddy,”’ he said, as he paused from digging through his home to look for food and valuables.
Idam Samawi, the district chief of Bantul, acknowledged the relief effort was slow.
”I regret the slow distribution of aid,” he told the Associated Press.
”Many government officials have no sensitivity to this, they work slowly under complicated bureaucracy while survivors are racing against death and disease.”
Two Singapore military cargo planes were the first international aid flights to arrive at Yogyakarta airport, carrying doctors and medical supplies, but the aid was not scheduled to leave for the quake zone until Monday.
Countries across Asia and the world pledged millions of dollars, tonnes of supplies and hundreds of personnel. Private aid groups and the United Nations were also mobilising to get staff and supplies into Indonesia.
The quake also damaged the world-renowned Prambanan temple complex, sending intricate carved reliefs crashing to the ground and undoing in less than a minute much of more than 70 years of painstaking reconstruction work.
On Sunday, chunks of broken walls and carvings lay scattered over the ground at the foot of its eight main Hindu shrines. Small temples called ”candis” also had toppled over.
An initial survey showed there was extensive damage to the complex, said Agus Waluyo, head of the Yogyakarta Archaeological Conservation Agency.
Hospitals were badly stretched to treat the people needing emergency care.
Doctors struggled to care for the injured, hundreds of whom were lying on plastic sheets, straw mats and newspapers outside overcrowded hospitals, some hooked to intravenous drips dangling from trees.
Relatives fanned victims in the heat in temporary shelters set up in the parking lot and corridors of Yogyakarta’s Dr Sardjito Hospital.
”We have too many patients and they’re still arriving,” said Aru, a doctor, adding that the hospital had received more than 2 000 people.
Though some corpses were pulled from the rubble early on Sunday, residents in villages visited by reporters said there were few people or bodies trapped beneath collapsed houses, mostly simple brick and wood structures.
Most of the dead were buried in village graveyards within hours of the disaster, in line with Islamic tradition.
In Peni, a small village on Bantul’s southern outskirts, residents set up simple clinics to treat injuries, but were hampered by shortages of medicine and equipment. A group of women cooked catfish caught in a nearby pond for dozens of people huddled under a large tent.
The quake’s epicentre was 80km south of Mount Merapi, and activity at the volcano increased soon after the temblor. A large burst spewed hot clouds and sent debris cascading about 3,5km down its western flank. No one was injured because nearby residents had already been evacuated.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific ”Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. It has the largest number of volcanos in the world ‒ Sapa-AP