INDONESIA DEATHS MAY TOP 1,300 … 3,000 MISSING; Landslides bury four villages

The death toll from Indonesia’s massive earthquake will likely double as officials on Saturday reached rural communities wiped out by landslides that buried more than 600 people under mountains of mud, most of them guests at a wedding celebration. Virtually nothing remained of four villages that had dotted the hillside of the Padang Pariman district in Indonesia’s West Sumatra just three days ago, said officials and an Associated Press photographer who flew over the devastated area. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, search and rescue experts and cleanup crews arrived at the regional airport from around the globe with tons of food, tents, medicine, clean water, generators and a field hospital.

But with no electricity, fuel shortages and telecommunication outages the massive operation was chaotic. Roughly 400 people were at a communal wedding in Pulau Aiya village when Wednes-day’s 7.6 magnitude quake unleashed a torrent of mud, rock and felled palm trees, said Rustam Pakaya, the head of Indonesia’s Health Ministry crisis center.
“They were sucked 30 meters (100 feet) deep into the earth,” he said. “Even the mosque’s minaret, taller than 20 meters (65 feet), disappeared.” Twenty-six bodies were pulled from the rubble-strewn brown earth in nearby Lubuk Lawe and Jumena, but 618 bodies remained far beyond the reach of residents who worked without outside help because roads had been severed, he said.

The number of fatalities in the disaster will jump to more than 1,300 if all those people are confirmed dead. The government’s death toll on Saturday held steady at 715, most reported in the region’s badly hit capital of 900,000, Padang, where aid efforts are concentrated.
As many as 3,000 people had been declared missing before news about the obliterated villages emerged, while 2,400 were hospitalized and tens of thousands of people are believed to have been displaced.
More than 1.1 million residents live in the 10 quake-hit districts, the United Nations estimated in a situation assessment, while the government said more than 30,000 homes, schools, mosques, hospitals and government offices had been flattened or severely damaged — 17 percent of all local infrastructure.
An AP photographer who flew over Padang Pariaman district in a helicopter saw several landslides in the area.

At Limo Koto Timur village, a giant section of a hillside was swept away and the remains of destroyed houses protruded from the mud. The ruins of other tin-roofed homes hung precariously over the edge of a huge crevice that was torn through rice fields and forest. Roads were gone and palm trees had been uprooted and swept downhill, leaving patches of brown earth where villages once stood.
El-Mostafa Benlamlih, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Indonesia, told the AP that 200 houses were swept away in Pulau Aiya. Aid efforts are “still concentrated in Padang area,” with outlying areas still short of aid, Benlamlih said, adding that aid agencies would focus on restoring water, electricity, sanitation and preventing disease.
Deliveries came on C-130 cargo planes from the United States, Russia and Australia. Japanese, Swiss, South Korean and Malaysian search and rescue teams scoured the debris. Tens of millions of dollars in donations came from more than a dozen countries to supplement $400 million the Indonesian government said it would spend over the next two months.

On Friday, survivors buried under a collapsed hotel in Padang sent a cell-phone text message to a relative saying he and some others were alive. But, disappointed rescue workers were unable to locate anyone at the Ambacang hotel where as many as 200 people were staying.
After several hours of digging through blocks of concrete, steel and bricks, rescue workers gave up. Padang police chief Col Boy Rafli Amar told reporters, “So far rescuers have found nothing.”
Hidehiro Murase, head of a Japanese search dog team, said its search had been fruitless.
“We did an extensive search this morning, but there were no signs of life. Our dogs are trained to smell for living people, not the dead, and they didn’t sense anything,” he told the AP.
The UN said there are sufficient fuel stocks in the area for four days, but with the road to a major depot cut off by landslides gasoline prices had jumped six-fold.
Areas with “huge levels of damage to infrastructure were in need of basic food and tents for temporary shelter,” it said.
Wednesday’s quake originated on the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations.
Samoa
Samoa is planning a mass burial for victims of the tsunami that devastated the Pacific island earlier this week, the government said Friday, as the death toll from the disaster crept towards 200.
Many families were already burying their loved ones in unmarked graves on high ground less ravaged by Tuesday’s walls of water that wiped out coastal settlements, but Samoa has offered a mass funeral for around 100 others.
“The government has met with the families of the dead and made the offer of a national burial and is offering a place for all those victims to be buried together,” government press secretary Uale Papalii Paimalelagi told AFP.
“Some of the victims have already been taken by their families and buried, so we expect around 100 to be laid to rest in the mass burial,” he said, adding it was up to relatives to accept the offer, but most had agreed.
The ceremony is tentatively planned for Tuesday, but may be postponed at the request of families to allow time for overseas relatives to arrive, the office of Women, Village Council and Social Development Minister Fiame Mataafa Naomi said.
The mass burial plans were revealed as the number of those feared dead in the region reached at least 180, with officials warning it would rise further.
Meanwhile, Samoan officials shifted their focus from rescuing lives to providing survivors with food, water and power, but stressed it didn’t mean they were giving up on the missing.
Electricity and water services were restored in about half of the affected villages in Samoa and American Samoa, and almost all of the territory was expected to have power from generators within three to five days, said Ken Tingman, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s federal coordinating officer.
FEMA will also establish an office to provide housing assistance to residents displaced after Tuesday’s earthquake and tsunami, said American Samoa Gov Togiola Tulafono.
Taule’alea Laavasa, chairman of the Samoan government’s National Disaster Advisory Committee, said Friday that relief work was going well with the help of neighbors including New Zealand and Australia.
But many survivors refused to return to their villages.
“They’re scared; a lot of them have been psychologically affected by seeing their relations die in huge numbers,” Laavasa said.
The death toll rose to 170, including 129 in Samoa, 32 in the nearby US territory of American Samoa and nine in Tonga.
Tingman said that although they are now focusing more on helping survivors, it didn’t mean the missing were being given up for dead. “You never lose hope,” he said. Some Samoans have been forced to forgo burial rituals because their villages are gone. Other families have had to speed up the burial process because loved ones’ bodies were found in such decomposed states. The village of Leone, the center of Christianity on the island, was a bleak landscape of rubble. The beach meeting houses that had been the center of cultural rituals and family meetings were destroyed. An overturned van was jammed into the roof of one beach house. Leone residents estimate the tsunami destroyed about one-third of the village, which has a population of 3,000. The victims were mostly elderly or toddlers. Four villagers were killed while making crafts on the shore. About two dozen soldiers and airmen from the Hawaii National Guard had the heart-wrenching task Friday of searching through the village’s muddy debris for a missing 6-year-old boy named Columbus Sulivai.

Bill Hopkinson, a village chief, said the boy had been on the way to school with his sisters. “When the earthquake hit, instead of seeking higher ground, they came running back home,” Hopkinson said. Both girls died. Samoa’s tourism industry, meanwhile, said it feared a “second tsunami” of vacation cancellations after the deadly waves wiped out some of the South Pacific country’s most idyllic white-sand beaches and resorts. Tourism is Samoa’s largest industry, and travel industry representatives visiting the main island’s wrecked southeast coast said Friday about one-quarter of the tourist accommodations had been destroyed. Nynette Sass, chief executive of the Samoa Hotel Association, said the industry was alarmed by anecdotal reports of mass vacation cancellations since Tuesday’s disaster. “If substantial numbers of tourists start canceling, that will be like having a second tsunami on us,” Sass said. The industry accounts for 25 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, she said.