The 30-strong wedding party was getting ready to travel to a ceremony in a nearby village when the earthquake struck, triggering a landslide that would sweep them to their death.
They were gathering outside a house when tonnes of earth began a deadly descent that killed an estimated 400 people in four villages in this outlying mountainous area of Indonesia’s quake zone, rescue officials said.
“Ten of them were from my family, including my wife, my three children,” said one distraught man who was working outside the village when the tremors loosened part of an outcrop above in the hills.
“I rushed to get to the village and when I got here everything had been flattened ... I’m trying to find my kids, but it’s impossible with only my hands. We need heavy machinery,” he said.
The bride and groom were safe because they were in another village where the ceremony was to take place, a rescue official working at the scene said.
The landslide buried Pulau Aie as well as three neighboring hamlets of Lubuk Laweh, Cumanak and Gunung Tiga about 75km northwest of the worst-hit city in the quake zone, Padang.
Many houses had completely vanished, while the roofs of others could be seen poking out above the mud. Fragments of furniture and clothes were mixed up in the mud as coconut trees lay all around, toppled by the unstoppable force of tonnes of rock and earth.
“I was in the house when I felt the shaking,” said Rosmi, a 55-year-old mother in Cumanak.
“Minutes after the earthquake when I was already outside, I heard sounds like thunder and suddenly I saw the earth coming down the hill and I ran away to save myself,” she said.
In the hills above the village, a brown area clearly visible in the lush green tropical vegetation marked the spot where the rock started to tumble.
Surveying the scene of destruction, local rescue official Topan said that up to 400 people might be lost.
“The difficulty in this rescue operation is that the houses are buried under the soil as much as 4m deep,” he said. “So far we have been using our hands to dig.”
Some could be seen using hoes, others bits of wood in the desperate search for bodies and survivors.
In Lubuk Laweh, 34-year-old Basmawati stood on the spot where her family home had once stood.
She was out of town when the earthquake struck and now 10 members of her family are feared dead, including her mother and father.
“I haven’t stopped crying since I heard the news of the landslide,” she said. “I can’t stop imagining my parents and my other family members, how painful it was for them before they died.”
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