Search teams have found 29 bodies so far, and no one alive.
“After four days .... to find survivors is almost impossible,” said Lieutenant Colonel Harris, the chief of the 50-member rescue team, which comprises military, police and Red Cross personnel.
“The smell of decomposing bodies is very strong,” said Harris, who uses one name.
The National Disaster Management Agency said 83,712 houses, 200 public buildings and 285 schools were destroyed. Another 100,000 buildings and 31km of road were badly damaged, and five bridges had collapsed.
Meanwhile, hundreds of doctors, nurses, search and rescue experts and cleanup crews arrived on Saturday at the Padang airport from around the world with tonnes of food, tents, medicine, clean water, generators and a field hospital.
But with no electricity, fuel shortages and telecommunication outages, the massive operation was chaotic.
Deliveries came on C-130 cargo planes from the US, Russia and Australia. Japanese, Swiss, South Korean and Malaysian search and rescue teams scoured the debris. Tens of millions of dollars in donations came from more than a dozen countries to supplement US$400 million the Indonesian government said it would spend over the next two months.
The UN said there are sufficient fuel stocks in the area for four days, but with the road to a major depot cut off by landslides, gasoline prices had jumped six-fold.
Areas with “huge levels of damage to infrastructure were in need of basic food and tents for temporary shelter,” it said.
Wednesday’s quake originated on the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations.
A 5.5-magnitude earthquake shook the eastern province of West Papua yesterday, the US Geological Survey said. There were no reports of casualties.
RSS