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PALU, Indonesia – The bodies stacked in the police hospital had begun to swell and decay when Sarah Wati arrived on Monday, shot and wounded.
After a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and a 20-foot tsunami that killed at least 844 people on Friday, the city of Palu in eastern Indonesia was still in shock. Hungry locals were asking for help, gunmen were looking for sold-out shops, crowds were besieging the airport, and many prison jails left the prisoners at large.
Ms. Wati had been in a crowd hustling, watching about 20 people attack an A.T.M. with picks, she says. Nearby, police fired in the air and sprayed bullets to clear looters and spectators. Ms. Wati, 20, unemployed and mother of a child, was hit in hand-to-hand combat.
Even with medication administered at the hospital, she was in tears of pain and shock.
Three days after the two natural disasters, Palu, a city of about 380,000 people, was tasked with identifying the dead and taking care of the living, some still trapped under the sheets of fallen buildings.
Unrestrained rescue efforts were hampered by limited heavy equipment, and the police were busy looking after looters. While President Joko Widodo said he was in favor of international aid, none has yet reached the quake zone. On the site of some collapsed buildings, workers were forced to work by hand, removing pieces of rubble.
Officials of the national disaster response warned that scenes of devastation were recurring throughout the central coast of the island of Sulawesi, especially in remote areas. The death toll, boosted by the failure of a series of early warning systems, is expected to increase further.
[[[[Damage investigation: scenes of the Indonesian tsunami.]
Landslides and roads raised by the earthquake prevented rescue workers from reaching entire villages. An Indonesian Red Cross team on Monday found the bodies of 36 people in Sigi, south of Palu. These deaths do not seem to have been included in the government's official count, which could be added to it.
In Donggala, a fishing region near Palu, hundreds of people gathered in roadside makeshift camps on Monday, either because their homes had been damaged or for fear of aftershocks.
"The situation in the affected areas is a nightmare," said Jan Gelfand, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, citing the cruel lack of food, water and shelter for survivors.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the disaster agency, said on Monday that at least 2,500 homes in the area had been destroyed, some of which were buried in the mud.
On Monday morning, thousands of desperate people stormed Palu airport, many of them apparently trying to flee the stricken city. The run on the runway was so frenzied that an Indonesian air force plane filled with emergency equipment could not land. The airport, hampered by a damaged control tower and a runway in poor condition, was briefly closed.
More than 1,000 convicts escaped from three local jails, the Indonesian authorities said Monday. A prison was burned. But detainee capture was not a top priority for the overburdened police, officials at the Justice Ministry said.
The residents wandered through the city, climbing broken roads to search for missing family members. Others have been demanding during a trip to the police hospital, some of which has been turned into a makeshift morgue.
On the road to Palu, the plaintiffs stopped the cars, pleading for everything: fuel, food, water. At least two aid vehicles were besieged by crowds.
Rescue efforts in Palu continued to focus on a crumpled hotel and mall, buildings where hope was most important to find survivors. On the ruins of Roa Roa, once a happy eight-story business hotel, a digger has moved large concrete slabs to reach those trapped underneath. On Sunday, a woman was pulled alive from the wreck.
In this sweltering city south of Ecuador, the authorities tried to get rid of the bodies quickly, bury them in a mass grave after taking DNA samples so that identities can be confirmed later.
"The smell of death is strong in the air," said Radika Pinto, regional manager of World Vision, an international organization of Christian humanitarian aid. "I fear that the death toll will continue to increase dramatically".
President Joko, who visited the region on Sunday, declared a national disaster, paving the way for the country's acceptance of foreign aid. Previously, local authorities had stated that they could handle the relief operations themselves and had rejected offers of assistance abroad, prompting much criticism.
Questions remained as to whether the country's notoriously inefficient bureaucracy could have done more to reduce the loss of life.
Thousands of Indonesian islands are scattered over one of the world's most seismically active stretches. The central province of Sulawesi, where the earthquake hit Friday, is regularly submerged by tsunamis.
Yet the early warning system in Indonesia is a disaster. A network of 22 buoys supposed to monitor Indonesian open water movements has not been operational since 2012.
Nadrah, who, like many Indonesians, uses the same name, said residents of Donggala had not received any tsunami warnings. No siren sounds. No crazy text messages.
But Mrs. Nadrah, 54, knows since her childhood what can follow when the earth shakes. "Our parents told us that if the tremor is scary and lasts a long time, a tsunami will happen," she said. So she ran to the heights once the shaking subsided.
One of the worst tsunamis in recorded history hit the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 2004, killing more than 130,000 people. People died in 13 other countries during this tsunami.
Some of the old warning buoys have become moors for fishing boats, destroying sensitive equipment, officials from the national meteorological, climatological and geophysical agency said.
"We have no manpower to monitor these buoys, and it is very expensive," said Rahmat Triyono, earthquake and tsunami manager at the meteorological agency. "We are doing our best with our limited resources."
Rahmat said buoys were not essential for disaster preparedness in Indonesia.
"It's not without the buoys, the early warning system will collapse," he said. "We will survive again because we have all these models, all the programs we are working on."
The magnitude of Friday's earthquake was strong enough to trigger an automatic tsunami warning in the Palu region, based on seismographic modeling. But even though an alert was issued, residents of Palu and Donggala said they had received no sign, such as a siren, about it.
Another system that could help prevent the first tsunamis, the tide gauges closer to the coast, was unnecessary because they had been set up to provide data every 15 minutes rather than at closer intervals.
In the case of Friday's tsunami, three successive waves flooded the coast within 11 minutes of the earthquake, officials said.
The closest gauge to Friday's tsunami site saw only a 2.3-inch rise in water levels as the reality reached 20 feet. Mr Sutopo, the spokesman for the emergency agency, said Monday that the biggest wave of Friday had hit the electricity poles in Donggala.
"You can say that Indonesia is not ready to receive tsunami warnings," said Eko Yulianto, tsunami expert at the Indonesian Institute of Science. "But we are a country with a lot of tsunamis. Gold time is very short and if people are not alerted, they are really in danger.
Yet, even though the people of central Sulawesi know that it is necessary to rush – either because of the muscle memory of previous tsunamis or because of government warnings – there is no network of tsunami shelters built on its vulnerable coast.
Monday, beyond a landscape strewn with kilometers of broken houses, the sea sparkled a seductive blue. But the people of Sulawesi Island, as elsewhere in Indonesia, know that another wave will come later. That's always the case.
Adam Dean reported from Palu, Indonesia; Hannah Beech from Bangkok; and Richard C. Paddock of Mamuju, Indonesia. Muktita Suhartono and Restidia Putri provided reports from Jakarta (Indonesia) and Fira Abdurachman from Donggala (Indonesia).
