[ad_1]
PALU, Indonesia – Nurdiyah Rasid was praying in the evening near the beach when she felt the earthquake occur at dusk on Friday. She came out of the mosque to see the water of an adjacent canal sucked into the sea.
A few minutes later, she returned, she said, part of a powerful tsunami that pounded the shoreline before bursting into the interior.
"We just ran," said Rasid. "There were no sirens, no warning. Just the jolt and the panic. "
Authorities warned that they could find thousands more people than the 844 people so far confirmed to have been killed by the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and tsunami that followed. The waters swelled to 20 feet in places, whose size and speed increased as they stretched into a narrow bay before crashing into the city of 380,000 people.
Rescuers ran Monday to rescue the survivors from the rubble. The workers had already started placing their bodies side by side in a mass grave.
A powerful earthquake and tsunami hit Indonesia's Sulawesi island on Friday, killing at least 800 people. Authorities fear that the death toll will rise sharply, as many of them are still trapped under debris. Photo: Getty Images
Along the coast, debris was scattered on the beaches; in some interior areas, whole buildings seemed to be engulfed when violent shocks turned the soil into something like quicksand, a phenomenon that geologists call liquefaction. Families saved their lives as their homes slid and slid around them.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the Indonesian National Disaster Agency, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, landing in Patobo district in Palu. "It happened on a large scale," he said.
In the Balaroa neighborhood, where 1,147 houses collapsed, the land sank up to five meters in some places, while the earthquake pushed the other areas two meters or more, Nugroho said.
Telephone connections closer to the epicenter are at best sporadic and roads leading to other severely affected areas are impassable.
Recently homeless people such as Ms. Rasid have told stories of sudden devastation. A man in a seaside neighborhood said that he only had a few minutes to react. "What I remember is that the ground finally stops shaking … and you could see the surf crashing off," he said. "It was the color of the ash, almost black."
On Monday, the authorities had received little information about what had happened in the highly affected Donggala region, near the epicenter of the earthquake, which is home to nearly 300,000 people.
As the scale of the disaster increased, the relief effort accelerated.
Throughout the day, relief planes left the surrounding cities with some commercial flights. The United Nations relief agency estimated Monday that 191,000 people on the island of Sulawesi, where the disaster occurred, are in dire need of humanitarian aid.
The tsunami waters that swept the city of Palu, Indonesia, have reached 20 feet high in some places.
Photo:
jewel samad / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has authorized the acceptance of international aid, with neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Australia ready to send relief teams and other relief supplies. The United States offered to send the necessary help, as did China.
The government is sending as much food and water as possible by plane, and refueling for generators and lifting gear to free the survivors was underway, said Thomas Lembong, chairman of the Indonesian Coordinating Council, on Monday. investments in Jakarta.
Time is essential. Rescuers believe that there could be dozens of people staying in the rubble of collapsed buildings. Some fifty people may be stranded in the remains of Roa Roa Hotel, where a 25-year-old woman was found alive Sunday night, officials said.
Other people were again removed from the rubble, including a 15-year-old girl who was trapped when her family's house collapsed.
In other parts of the city, a mosque was partially submerged by the tsunami. an 820-foot bridge with bright yellow arches lay in the ruins where he had already crossed the Palu River.
Residents looted supermarkets and other stores to refuel. At least 50 motorcycles were lined up in a damaged gas station where their owners waited to fill the tanks.
"They steal it," said a passer-by.
In some areas, police guard the banks.
After some convenience stores were looted Sunday, Interior Minister Tjahjo Kumolo said the government would reimburse homeowners for the losses incurred.
At the city's airport, hundreds of families camped in the hope of being able to leave on one of the planes providing help.
Indonesian rescuers are working on the Roa Roa hotel, which collapsed in search of survivors in Palu, central Sulawesi, Indonesia on Monday.
Photo:
irham / epa-efe / rex / EPA / Shutterstock mast
Basrin Hamsar said his house had been almost completely destroyed and his wife had been hit by debris. His wound began to smell; he brought his family to the airport in the hope of taking the plane. "It is dark and we are too afraid to stay at home," he said.
Other Indonesians returned to Palu by plane to search for relatives or discover what had happened to their home.
Jemmy Langelo was in Jakarta on business; he booked a flight to Makassar, at the southern tip of Sulawesi, the island where disaster occurred, and then he boarded a Hercules military transport plane .
His house, several kilometers from the ocean, has largely survived. "He is still standing but cracked in some places," he said.
Indonesia is located on the Ring of Fire, a series of fault lines and volcanoes straddling the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and regularly experiences earthquakes and other national disasters.
According to estimates, after the 2004 Asian tsunami, most of which killed 228,000 people in Indonesia, authorities in the region have been striving to maintain an adequate early warning system for tsunamis.
During the Friday earthquake in Sulawesi, Indonesia, some buildings in the city of Palu were engulfed when solid soil behaved like a liquid, a process known as liquefaction; Other buildings collapsed in the earthquake or were hit by the tsunami that followed.
Photo:
Carl Cour / Getty Images
The current system, which includes a series of buoys deployed on the high seas, has not been operational since 2012. Some cables were broken by passing ships or being taken away by fishermen.
A recent project to install new censors with more warning time was stalled this summer when the fall in the value of the Indonesian currency exceeded budget limits, according to Louise Comfort of the University of Pittsburgh, who was part of the initiative.
Even this system may not have adequately warned the inhabitants of Palu. The epicenter of the earthquake was just 50 miles north of the city and they would have had little time to prepare for the tsunami, even if the word was immediately announced.
Officials said they sent a tsunami warning via SMS and social media five minutes after the earthquake. In many places, it seemed like it was too late or just did not touch people.
Telecommunications links in many areas have already been destroyed by the earthquake, said Nugroho, spokesman for the anti-disaster agency.
In some areas, he said, people did not seem to realize that they had to move away from the coast and seek higher ground in the event of an earthquake.
Many survivors began to gather around government buildings in a part of Palu that appeared to be less affected. On Monday, a tent city was taking shape on the lawn of the governor's residence as aid workers and other volunteers began to arrive.
Some displaced residents said they saw President Widodo visit the city the day before. Ms. Rashid, who escaped the tsunami on the waterfront, showed a large bag of cooking oil, rice, tea and sugar that she had received during her visit to her camp.
As the number grew, those already there offered newcomers hot bowls of chicken soup.
-I-Made Sentana in Jakarta contributed to this article.
Write to Ben Otto at [email protected]
