/ 5 June 2006

Quake toll revised down as aid flow improves

Officials in Indonesia on Monday revised down the death toll from a strong earthquake in Java to nearly 5 800 as new aid supplies helped survivors move forward on the long road to recovery.

The United Nations said distribution of food, medicines and water had greatly improved in devastated areas of central Java island, but emphasised the urgent need to provide shelter to about 340 000 left homeless.

“It really is in full swing. We’ve overcome most of the logistical bottlenecks that prevented the flow of assistance,” Bo Asplund, the head of the UN mission in Indonesia, said during a visit to the zone.

The UN has estimated that $100-million is needed over the next six months to cope with the disaster.

In a sign that life was returning to normal across the area, primary school students sat for regular end-of-year exams — albeit in tents and makeshift shelters, as hundreds of schools were flattened in the May 27 quake.

After sending assessment teams to central Java and Yogyakarta provinces, the social-affairs ministry revised down the quake death toll from 6 234 to 5 782. The number of injured also fell from 46 000 to 33 000.

But the ministry dramatically raised the number of people displaced in the crisis, saying more than 343 000 would spend a tenth night in the open, many of them under rudimentary tents made of plastic sheeting and bamboo poles.

“Emergency shelter remains one of our priorities,” Puji Pujiono, the deputy area humanitarian coordinator for the UN, told Agence France-Presse.

Yogyakarta provincial secretary Bambang Priyohadi said 200 000 tents were needed, while the UN appealed on Sunday for an influx of building materials, saying tents were sometimes difficult to set up amid the rubble.

The Indonesian government has earmarked more than $160-million to rebuild more than 200 000 homes destroyed or badly damaged in the zone.

Charlie Higgins, the UN’s area humanitarian coordinator, said food aid was flowing more freely throughout the disaster area, but cautioned that more clean water was needed to avert widespread sanitation problems in the short term.

“There is definitely a risk of water-borne and sanitation-related diseases, especially in densely populated areas,” said Astrid van Agthoven, water and sanitation project officer for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

The health-care situation has improved dramatically, Higgins said, noting “a reduction in the number of patients in the hospitals”, which were overwhelmed by tens of thousands of people seeking treatment for quake-related injuries.

Indonesian Vice-President Yusuf Kalla visited Yogyakarta, the main city in the quake zone, hailing the efforts of foreign-aid agencies and dispatching 200 trucks loaded with rice to the hard-hit Bantul and Klaten districts.

Provincial authorities in Yogyakarta will set up bank accounts for each family affected by the disaster to help them protect their aid funds, Priyohadi said, noting: “A tent is not a safe place to save that money.”

In the village of Serut, sixth-grade girls wearing red-and-white uniforms sat under tents or outside their damaged classrooms to take their end-of-year exams.

“It was difficult. I was feeling sad and it wasn’t easy to concentrate,” said 12-year-old Yuli Amberwati, who lost one of her friends in the quake.

“I wasn’t well prepared because I couldn’t study at home,” she said, remembering her dead classmate. “She was the cleverest one.”

To the north, hundreds of villagers were evacuated from the slopes of the Mount Merapi volcano, which continued to belch out an increased number of lava trails and heat clouds for the ninth day since the quake.

“The flows of heat clouds are now taking place every hour, and continuously, and this is worrying,” said Subandriyo of the vulcanology office in Yogyakarta. — AFP