[ad_1]
JAKARTA, Indonesia – Citing its fears of illness, Indonesia will abandon body searches this week, as thousands of people are reported missing in the muddy mountains and wrecks of an earthquake. devastating land and tsunami.
Rescuers operating heavy equipment found more than 100 bodies a day in the carnage left after the September 28 disasters in and around the city of Palu, a city of more than 350,000 people located in the city. mouth of a beautiful bay of the island of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia. On Monday, the official record of confirmed deaths reached 1,948.
The magnitude 7.5 trembler shook the Earth to such an extent that it became almost liquid, a phenomenon known as liquefaction, and buried entire neighborhoods. Officials say at least 5,000 people have not been found.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the National Agency for Disaster Mitigation, announced Monday that large-scale recovery operations would cease after Thursday, 14 days after the earthquake, all missing persons being presumed dead .
"We are concerned that the discovery of rotting bodies can trigger disease," Nugroho said.
This means that huge parts of the urban city of Palu with thousands of homes will become essentially mass graves. The local population will be allowed to continue looking for the missing, he said, but officials will try to persuade them to "give up".
The hardest-hit neighborhoods, where mud mounds rising to more than 18 feet above collapsed homes and an unknown number of deaths, could be turned into parks or urban forests, Sutopo said. . Survivors of the sites will be moved to areas less vulnerable to the earthquake.
Palu remains a city in shock. More than 60,000 people live outside their homes in ruins or under orange and blue tarps in the dry hills, fearing that the aftershocks will shake the remaining structures. Schools remain closed and most business is closed.
Efforts to replenish the city and its survivors with staple foods and basic services have grown in recent days, the port has reopened and an airfield on the neighboring island of Borneo has begun shipping. aid channeled by foreign air forces, including the United States.
On Monday, a mobile air traffic control tower began operations at the Palu Airfield, replacing an improvised operations center installed on a scaffold under a blue tarp after the launch. collapse of the old pylon.
The new tower will improve aviation safety as some 200 aircraft now fly daily to Palu as part of relief operations. This is a considerable increase over the maximum 35 days before the disaster, according to AirNav, the Indonesian air traffic controller.
A large number of these flights come from an acceleration of international relief efforts. The US Air Force flew three Hercules cargo planes from Guam to Balikpapan, where a hangar serves as a refueling point for aid from Americans and aid workers from the United States, Japan, Australia and Australia. from New Zealand.
Lieutenant-Colonel Aaron Lane, commanding officer of 36th Mobility Response Squadron, said international crews were flying 11 times a day from Balikpapan, with the United States making two to three sorties.
In Palu, hundreds of residents lined up to leave the city aboard Indonesian military planes and civilian planes. The terminal, badly damaged, reopened its doors in a limited way.
The earthquake rocked or severely damaged tens of thousands of homes, hospitals, schools, places of worship and others. The tsunami caused by the earthquake spread into the narrow bay of Palu, reaching nearly 20 feet high and spreading over miles of coastline. And in some places, liquefaction has swept entire neighborhoods and villages.
Palu is largely built on sediments driven by the Palu River from the nearby mountains. This makes it particularly vulnerable to liquefaction, in which the violent earthquake can destroy the soil structure and sometimes raise the water table to transform what was once a solid land into an unpredictable slush.
Petobo was one of the most affected areas, where more than 2,000 houses and an area of nearly 450 acres were destroyed in the form of a horizontal mudslide. Rescuers found more than 100 bodies, but the work was slow, under a hot, tropical sun, in areas devoid of shade trees.
"We barely dug 10% of the surface," said Yusuf Latif, spokesman for the search and rescue agency.
Write to Ben Otto at [email protected] and I made Sentana at [email protected]
