Thousands trapped under rubble after powerful Indonesia earthquake

Quake brings down hospital, hotels, homes and bridges in Padang, western Sumatra

Thousands of people were feared trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings following a powerful earthquake in the Indonesian city of Padang, a senior health ministry official said today.

Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry's disaster centre, said a hospital near the epicentre had also collapsed.

"Jamil hospital collapsed and thousands of people are trapped in the rubble of buildings," Pakaya said.

The magnitude 7.6 quake was centred 32 miles north-west of the city in western Sumatra, said the US geological survey.

An earlier quake prompted a tsunami that struck the Pacific islands of Samoa and American Samoa, killing more than 100 people.

Local reports said the Indonesian quake brought down buildings and bridges, damaged houses and started fires. There were no immediate reports of fatalities but several people were reported injured.

"A number of hotels in Padang have been destroyed," Rahmat Triyono, of the Indonesian geophysics and meteorology agency was quoted as saying by the Jakarta Post. "Up to now we haven't been able to reach Padang. Communications have been cut."

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued an alert but later cancelled it. Tremors from the quake were said to have been felt in Malaysia and Singapore.

A 6.2-magnitude aftershock followed the initial quake about 22 minutes later, the meteorological agency said.

The earthquake came hours after another quake triggered a tsunami that left at least 100 people dead on the Pacific islands of Samoa and American Samoa.

A resident described the scene to Indonesia's Metro Television. "For now I can't see dead bodies, just collapsed houses. Some half-destroyed, others completely. People are standing around too scared to go back inside. They fear a tsunami.

"No help has arrived yet. I can see small children standing around carrying blankets. Some people are looking for relatives but all the lights have gone out completely."

Other eyewitness accounts said people fled on to the streets as buildings collapsed.

"Hundreds of houses have been damaged along the road," Reuters quoted a witness as saying. "There are some fires, bridges are cut and there is extreme panic here because water pipes are broken and there is flooding in the streets."

Padang, a city of 900,000 people, sits on one of the world's most active faultlines along the "ring of fire", where the Indo-Australia plate and the Eurasia tectonic plate grind together to cause frequent tremors and, occasionally, large earthquakes.

The same faultline caused the 2004 tsunami in which 232,000 people died in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and other countries across the Indian Ocean.

"Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake," Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute, said earlier this year. "The entire city could drown in a tsunami triggered by such a quake,." he added.

Officials in Indonesia reported finding 200 bodies and said the toll was likely to be much higher, while at least 119 people were killed in the Samoan region.

The Indonesia quake, with a magnitude of 7.6, hit at 5:15 p.m. local time Wednesday. It knocked down buildings, started fires, destroyed roads, and cut off power and communications to Padang, a coastal city of 900,000 on Sumatra island. Buildings swayed hundreds of miles away in neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.

In sprawling, low-lying Padang, the shaking was so intense that people crouched or sat on the street to avoid falling. Children screamed as thousands of people tried to get away from the coast in cars and on motorbikes, honking horns.

The quake occurred a day after a killer tsunami hit islands in the South Pacific. It was along the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 230,000 people in 11 nations.

In Samoa, the tsunami was caused by a magnitude-8.0 quake that unleashed four waves 15 to 20 feet high. They roared ashore within minutes of the temblor, which hit at 6:48 a.m. local time Tuesday, and spread a mile inland authorities said.

On Tuesday evening, President Obama issued a major disaster declaration for American Samoa, which is about 120 miles from the quake's epicenter, and the first U.S. relief flight arrived Wednesday in the island's capital, Pago Pago, where debris had to be cleared from the runway.

The C-130 cargo flight out of Hawaii carried supplies and emergency officials, and it was to be followed Wednesday by a Navy frigate and a second plane carrying food, water, medicine, and medical supplies and personnel, said W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"Our focus is on life safety, life sustainment and getting resources in there to support the governor and his team," Fugate said in a telephone briefing with reporters, referring to Gov. Togiola Tulafono. "Our focus is on the immediate needs of the injured and the thousands, tens of thousands of survivors down there," he added.

Time and distance will constrain the U.S. response. American Samoa is roughly 2,300 miles southwest of Hawaii and 4,500 miles from the west coast of the United States, he said.

U.S. officials said they expect to provide relief materials for weeks by sea as well as more urgent materials by air. "This will not be a short-term response based on reports of damage," Fugate said.

In Pago Pago, the streets and fields were filled with debris, mud, overturned cars and several boats as a major cleanup effort stretched into the night. Several buildings in the city -- just a few feet above sea level -- were flattened. Power was expected to be out in some areas for up to a month.

Water service has been restored to many villages, but power is still out in most areas. More than 1,000 people spent the night in 15 emergency shelters.

After the earthquake in Indonesia on Wednesday, a tsunami warning was issued for countries along the Indian Ocean, but it proved unnecessary. There were no reports of giant waves in western Indonesia, but the destruction was vast. Early Thursday, a shallow inland earthquake struck, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Wednesday's earthquake flattened buildings and felled trees in Padang, damaged mosques and hotels, and crushed cars. In the gathering darkness shortly after the quake, residents fought some fires with buckets of water and used their bare hands to search for survivors, pulling at the wreckage and tossing it away piece by piece.

"This is a high-scale disaster, more powerful than the earthquake in Yogyakarta in 2006, when more than 3,000 people died," Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said, referring to a major city on the main Indonesian island of Java.

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu in Washington contributed to this report.

 

By Soraya Permatasari

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Three days after an earthquake devastated the Indonesian town of Padang on Sumatra’s west coast, the chance of finding any survivors is “almost zero,” the national search and rescue agency said.

“Life detectors, which detect heartbeat, have shown there isn’t anyone alive underneath the rubble of most high-rise buildings in Padang,” Gagah Prakoso, spokesman for the Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency, said today at an operation center in the city. “We have used detectors, dogs, even bare hands, every means possible to search for any survivors, but I have to say that the chance is almost zero by now.”

The death toll from the 7.6-magitude temblor that leveled homes, mosques and hotels in the coastal city of about 800,000 was 496 people as of today, Priyadi Kardono, a spokesman at the National Disaster Management Agency in Jakarta, said by phone. “Many thousands more” are trapped under crushed buildings, the United Nations said in a statement on its Web site.

Governments around the world have provided money and other aid such as medicine, tents, food and search teams with sniffer dogs. Still, time, weather and the number of destroyed buildings ensure the death toll will rise significantly.

“Realistically it is very, very difficult for anyone to still be alive after being trapped without water and food under the rubble for so long,” Prakoso said.

There were 125 people, including guests and participants in two seminars, staying at the 140-room Ambacang hotel when it was destroyed in the earthquake, Sarana Aji, the hotel’s general manager, said in an interview in Padang. Teams have recovered 29 bodies from the hotel, he said. One survivor was rescued yesterday, he said.

Decomposing Bodies

The smell of decomposing bodies was strong near what used to be the swimming pool on the Ambacang’s second floor, now lying shattered on the ground. Five excavating machines moved chunks of broken concrete and steel reinforcing bar that used to form the floors and walls of the destroyed building.

“I urge everyone to accept the possibility that the trapped victims may not survive,” Aji said. “Our focus remains to find survivors, though the chance is getting slim.”

Elsewhere in Padang, stores and small restaurants began to resume operations, providing much needed service in the devastated town that has been paralyzed for the past three days. Some hotels and hospitals were running on electricity provided by their own generators, as power in the city was still unavailable. Long queues formed at filling stations as people hoped to obtain scarce gasoline.

‘The Earth Shook Violently’

Nursim Salam, 55, a teacher at LBA Lia school in Padang, was trapped underneath the collapsed school for three hours.

“The earth shook violently,” Salam said in an interview. “I quickly told my students to run out of the building when pieces of brick walls started to crumble, but it was too late. There was a loud noise, then the roof collapsed. Everything was dark and it was difficult to breathe.”

Salam and four students were on the second floor of the school when the building collapsed.

“We had to crawl from one empty space to another,” Salam said. “Hours later I saw a blinking light coming from the other side so I made my way there and saw someone holding a cell phone. It was a student from another class. With the help from the cell-phone light, we made our way down slowly to the lobby because we were on the second floor, but after everything collapsed we were on the ground.”

“Eventually we heard some people outside and screamed for help. They gave us drinks and a bit of food and stayed with us until we were rescued about one hour later. My throat feels so dry, even now I have to keep drinking or it gets very dry. It could be the dust.”

Doctors Struggling

Doctors trying to treat hundreds of injured survivors are running out of medicine, and damage to hospitals has left them without sufficient space to operate.

At the M Jamil Hospital, the biggest public hospital in Padang, doctors are overwhelmed by critically injured people and the bodies of those who didn’t survive.

“These bodies are not so easy to identify because they aren’t complete,” Asril Zahari, 57, the hospital’s head medical coordinator, said yesterday. “We received 92 of them in total. Most of them were claimed by their families already except for these 10. They are from the Ambacang hotel and Aldira Motor,” he said, referring to an auto showroom in the town.

“We treated 250 patients and operated on 120 of them,” Zahari said. “Many of them suffered from broken bones and head injuries. Initially we had enough supplies but there are just too many patients. We are running out of injection liquid, antibiotics, saline drips. Thank God, though, so far I can say that most patients have received treatment.”

Zahari, who lost an uncle in the quake, said his family is sleeping in the backyard at night because their home collapsed.

International Aid

The European Commission has provided 3 million euros, EC President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said in a press statement. The U.S. has provided $300,000 in assistance to Indonesia and set aside an additional $3 million to be used once needs are assessed. The U.S. is also sending a disaster-response team.

It’s the second earthquake to cause fatalities in Indonesia in less than a month after a magnitude-7 temblor south of Java on Sept. 2 left 82 people dead.

A tsunami generated by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake off northern Sumatra in December 2004 left about 220,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries around the Indian Ocean.

To contact the reporters on this story: Soraya Permatasari at soraya@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: October 3, 2009 03:13 EDT