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Indonesia Tsunami Toll Soars Amid Push to Save Survivors Indonesia Tsunami Toll Soars Above 800. ‘It Is Very Bad.’
(about 5 hours later)
PALU, Indonesia — Rescuers in Indonesia were scrambling on Sunday to reach people calling for help from collapsed buildings after a devastating earthquake spawned a tsunami that left more than 800 dead. BANGKOK — Soaring over eastern Indonesia on Friday, Petra Mandagi exulted at the perfect conditions for a paragliding addict: azure skies, a sweet breeze and a picture postcard bay rippling below.
“I can still hear the voices of the survivors screaming,” Muhammad Syaugi, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told a local news outlet, Detik.com, after visiting the site of a toppled hotel in Palu, on the island of Sulawesi. He added that 50 people could be trapped in the wreckage of the eight-story building. Even when a series of earthquakes began shaking the city of Palu on Friday afternoon after his paragliding competition had finished, Mr. Mandagi texted his wife in their hometown, Manado, and assured her that all was fine.
The disaster agency spokesman, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, said at a news conference on Sunday that the death toll from Friday’s twin disasters had more than doubled to 832, with nearly all of the reported deaths in Palu. That number was almost certain to rise, he added, as many surrounding coastal areas still were not able to report fully on casualties. On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, earthquakes were a fact of life, Mr. Mandagi, 35, told his wife.
“Many bodies were still under the wreckage, while many have not been reached,” he said. Less than an hour later, twin natural disasters — a 7.4 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami that unleashed an 18-foot wave — turned parts of Palu and the surrounding strip of coastline into a graveyard. As of Sunday evening, national disaster mitigation officials said that at least 832 people had been confirmed killed.
Aid and supplies were being sent to badly affected areas using military and commercial aircraft, including helicopters. The death toll, which had more than doubled from Sunday morning, was expected to climb much higher still, and questions began mounting as to why residents were not adequately warned of the tsunami, given the area’s long and deadly history of facing killer waves.
The cities of Donggala, the site closest to the earthquake’s epicenter, and Mamuju were also ravaged, but little information was available because of damaged roads and disrupted telecommunications. Footage from MetroTV on Sunday showed images of destroyed houses in Donggala and areas that were once land now inundated with water. Aerial video also showed the battered coastline surrounding Palu. None of the buoys spread out over Indonesia’s open water to help monitor for tsunamis had been operational for the past six years, according to Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman for the country’s national disaster agency.
President Joko Widodo was set to visit the area later Sunday. Only 22 such buoys had been placed across the vast archipelagic nation that sprawls across the Pacific and Indian oceans — and none of them worked. Some had even gone missing, Mr. Sutopo said.
Looters were stealing on Sunday from a badly damaged mall in Palu that was unguarded, apparently unconcerned about its safety despite continuing aftershocks. Residents were also seen returning to their destroyed homes and picking through waterlogged belongings, trying to salvage anything they could. The eight-story hotel where Mr. Mandag had been staying collapsed, burying him and around other 50 guests of the Roa Roa, including six more paragliders there to compete.
Mr. Nugroho said “tens to hundreds” of people had been taking part in a beach festival in Palu when the tsunami struck at dusk on Friday. Their fates were unknown. On Sunday, with no heavy equipment available, search-and-rescue workers used their hands to frantically claw through the rubble, with the voices of trapped victims calling out from the debris spurring on the brute manual effort.
Hundreds of people in the area were injured, and hospitals, many of them damaged by the magnitude-7.5 quake, were overwhelmed. Some patients were being treated outdoors because of strong aftershocks. A single body was pulled out of the hotel wreckage. But by Sunday evening, the site was eerily quiet, said Indonesian search-and-rescue staff.
Dwi Haris, whose back and shoulder were broken, rested outside Palu’s Army Hospital. He tearfully recounted feeling shaking of the hotel where his family had been staying as they visited Palu for a wedding. “Petra went to Palu to do what he loved most, which is paragliding,” said Nixon Ray, Mr. Mandagi’s business partner.
“There was no time to save ourselves. I was squeezed into the ruins of the wall, I think,” Mr. Haris said. “I heard my wife cry for help, but then silence. I don’t know what happened to her and my child. I hope they are safe." A fellow paragliding enthusiast, Mr. Ray, 51, decided at the last minute to skip the Palu competition but had urged Mr. Mandagi and two other friends to go without him.
Indonesia is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. In December 2004, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake off the western island of Sumatra set off a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries. In August, a powerful quake off the island of Lombok killed 505 people. “I feel like I sent them to a tragedy,” Mr. Ray said.
Palu, a city of more than 380,000, is built around a narrow bay that apparently magnified the force of the tsunami waters as they raced into the tight inlet. While search and rescue efforts in Palu centered on the Roa Roa Hotel and a shopping mall that had also crumpled, thousands of other buildings were destroyed by the powerful earthquake and the devastating tsunami.
Indonesian television showed dramatic smartphone video of a powerful wave hitting Palu, with people screaming and running in fear. The water smashed into buildings, tearing many apart. On Sunday, the city was strewn with debris, and bodies lay covered by tarpaulins. Information is always fragmented in the immediate aftermath of a natural catastrophe. But Indonesia’s disaster management machinery has seemed at times overwhelmed, even in a country that is geographically positioned to habitually endure earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes.
Nina, a 23-year-old woman who goes by one name, was working at a laundry service not far from the beach when the quake hit. She said it destroyed the shop, but she managed to escape and raced home to get her mother and younger brother. Mr. Sutopo admitted that he found out about the killer wave that inundated Palu, deluging a beach festival as it crashed over the sand, through social media and television reports.
“We tried to find shelter, but then I heard people shouting, ‘Water! Water!'” she recalled, crying. “The three of us ran, but got separated. Now I don’t know where my mother and brother are. I don’t know how to get information. I don’t know what to do.” “The disaster funding continues to decrease every year,” Mr. Sutopo said. “The threat of disasters increases, disasters increase, but the BNPB budget decreases.”
Indonesia is a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that are home to 260 million people. Roads and infrastructure are poor in many areas, making access difficult in the best of conditions. The earthquake and tsunami left mangled buildings and buckled roads. Communications with the area were difficult because power was out, hampering search and rescue efforts. Most people slept outdoors, fearing the aftershocks. B.N.P.B. is the Indonesian acronym for the national disaster mitigation agency.
“We hope there will be international satellites crossing over Indonesia that can capture images and provide them to us so we can use the images to prepare humanitarian aid,” said Mr. Nugroho, the disaster agency spokesman. On Sunday, rescue workers from domestic aid agencies trickled into Palu, having driven at least 20 hours from the nearest airport to set up their command centers in the devastated city. The Palu airport, damaged by the earthquake, was only accepting a limited number of planes laden with relief supplies.
In the chaos, more than half of the 560 inmates in a Palu prison fled after its walls collapsed, said its warden, Adhi Yan Ricoh. At least 16,000 people were made homeless by the earthquake and tsunami, and many aid agencies were busy ensuring that their own staff members were alive and safe. World Vision, which provides financial support to around 5,700 children in the region, has located nearly all of its 70 employees and their relatives but was still waiting word on one missing employee and two family members.
“It was very hard for the security guards to stop the inmates from running away, as they were so panicked and had to save themselves too,” he told the state news agency, Antara. Four houses of World Vision workers were flattened by the earthquake.
Mr. Ricoh said there was no immediate plan to search for the inmates because the prison staff and police were consumed with the rescue efforts. “We are very thankful that most of our staff are O.K. but we are very worried about the remaining people we cannot find yet,” said Doseba T. Sinay, World Vision’s national director for Indonesia.
“Don’t even think to find the inmates. We don’t even have time yet to report this incident to our superiors,” he said. The government echoed Mr. Doseba’s concerns that the body count may surge as search-and-rescue teams make their way to surrounding coastal settlements, like the fishing and diving community of Donggala, which has been largely cut off by landslides and other debris. Only 11 of the deaths confirmed so far are from Donggala.
“The deaths are believed to be still increasing since many bodies are still under the wreckage and many have not been able to be reached,” Mr. Sutopo said.
While World Vision’s staff from Donggala have made it safely to Palu city, where employees are sheltering in tarpaulin shelters set up in the courtyard of their office, they passed scenes of devastation on the way, Mr. Doseba said.
“They told me they saw lots of houses that were destroyed,” he said. “It is very bad.”
Even as aid groups began the grim motions of starting the gears of disaster relief, some complained that foreign aid workers with deep expertise were being prevented from traveling to Palu. According to Indonesian regulations, funding, supplies and staffing from overseas can only start flowing if the site of a calamity is declared a national disaster zone. That has not happened yet.
“It’s still a province level disaster,” said Aulia Arriani, a spokesperson for the Indonesian Red Cross. “Once the government says, ‘O.K., this is a national disaster,’ we can open for international assistance but there’s no status yet.”
As the second night fell on Palu after Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, friends and family of those still missing were holding out hope that their loved ones would be the miracles that leaven the bleak story lines of natural disasters.
On Saturday, a little boy was plucked from a sewer. On Sunday, rescuers freed a woman who had been pinned under rubble for two days with the body of her mother next to her.
Gendon Subandono, the coach of the Indonesian national paragliding team, had trained two of the missing paragliders for the Asian Games, which wrapped up earlier this month in Indonesia. Others of those trapped at the Roa Roa Hotel, Mr. Mandagi included, were his students.
“As a senior in the paragliding field, I have my own emotional burden,” he said.
Mr. Gendon recounted how, in the hours after the news of the Roa Roa Hotel collapse circulated among the paragliding community, he had desperately sent WhatsApp messages to the Palu competitors, who were taking part in the beach festival. His messages, though, only resulted in one gray check mark, rather than a pair of blue checks.
“I think that means the messages were not delivered,” he said.