More Than 1,000 Dead After Indonesian Quake

More Than 1,000 Dead After Indonesian Quake
By PETER GELLING and MARK McDONALD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/asia/02quake.html?ref=global-home


PADANG, Indonesia — This port city was in chaos on Thursday — fires burning, sirens blaring, dazed residents wandering the streets, hundreds of people trapped beneath collapsed buildings — after a powerful earthquake struck here on the island of Sumatra.

The death toll from the quake, which hit Wednesday evening here with a magnitude of 7.6, had risen to 1,100, with many hundreds more injured, according to John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, speaking at a news conference at the United Nations on Thursday.

“I fear these numbers will rise as more information becomes available,” Mr. Holmes said.

The rescue activity in the city was grim, as authorities dug further into collapsed hospitals, hotels, offices, homes and a school, and also began to reach rural areas in western Sumatra where landslides had shut roads, cut electricity and water supplies and damage was thought to be severe.

On Thursday morning, just as the city’s airport was reopening and rescue teams were setting to work, Padang was rattled by another quake, this one registering 6.6. The epicenter was 140 miles southeast of the earlier quake, according to the United States Geological Survey. There were no reports of casualties so far from the second temblor, Mr. Holmes said.

Nearly every building over three stories in Padang suffered damage, however, from the initial quake, whose epicenter was just 30 miles away. The city’s three main hospitals all collapsed, and at the biggest hospital, Djamil, beds were pulled from the wreckage to serve the injured, and were placed in make-shift tents the parking lot.

Soon, however, all the mattresses were soaked in blood. Gloves, medicine bottles and bandages were strewn on the ground. Dozens of bodies were piled nearby, some clothed, some not, and weeping citizens searched the faces for missing relatives. Late Thursday afternoon, a rumor based on local earthquake folklore raced through Padang, a city of 900,000, that another large quake was coming, and people lined up by the thousands for gasoline and food. Padang lies on the west-central coast of Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island, whose western coast is stippled with dozens of volcanoes. Padang also sits alongside the Sunda Trench, part of the notorious Ring of Fire, the volatile network of volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches that partly encircles the Pacific Basin. The ring — and Sumatra in particular — is a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity.

President Obama, who spent several years of his childhood living in Indonesia with his mother and his sister, said Thursday that the United States “stands ready to help in this time of need.”

“Indonesia’s an extraordinary country that’s known extraordinary hardship from natural disasters,” Mr. Obama said at the White House. “I know firsthand that the Indonesian people are strong and resilient and have the spirit to overcome this enormous challenge. As they do, they need to know that America will be their friend and partner.”

On Tuesday, thousands of miles away in the basin, an underwater earthquake measuring 8.0 created a tsunami that sent walls of water crashing into the islands of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.

Based on reports from the United Nations, island police, aid workers and news agencies, at least 157 people had been killed by the tsunami — 120 on Samoa, 30 on American Samoa and 7 on Tonga.

“Nature has been showing its destructive power in tragic ways,” Mr. Holmes said at the U.N. on Thursday. “There is a lot of emergency relief needed in all these cases.”

The prime minister of Samoa, Tuilaepa Sailele, while visiting one inundated village, witnessed the discovery of two bodies — a mother and a 12-year-old boy.

“It was shocking,” he said in an interview with Radio New Zealand. “The devastation that has been caused is complete. All this was achieved in 10 minutes.”

There also were reports of 145 people injured, some critically, and dozens of villages demolished throughout the islands. Many beachside resorts were wiped out, along with homes, boats and businesses. Widespread devastation also was seen on television from the American Samoan capital, Pago Pago.

“It is the worst one we have had,” said Lilo Malava, the police commissioner of Samoa, in a telephone interview.

The tsunami — described by the governor of American Samoa as a series of four major waves — arrived with so little warning that many residents and tourists were caught unawares.

Filipo Ilaoa, deputy director of the American Samoa office in Honolulu, said that the tsunami struck the territory’s coast in “a matter of minutes” after the quake and that many residents would not have had much time to get to higher ground.

New Zealand and Australia dispatched cargo flights and observation planes to the Samoas. And President Obama authorized federal funds to supplement local relief and recovery efforts on American Samoa, a United States territory.

The epicenters of the Samoan and Indonesian quakes, located about 6,000 miles apart, brought back vivid memories of the horrific tsunami that ravaged South Asia and Southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004. Nearly a quarter-million people across the Indian Ocean region were killed.

The Samoan tsunami and the quake in Indonesia, while stemming from similar causes, were not directly connected, according to Julie Dutton, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

Both occurred in spots where one plate of the earth’s crust is subducting, or sliding beneath another plate. In spots, the two plates can become stuck until accumulating pressure leads to a sudden heaving release of energy. Under the sea, if the quake is around a magnitude of 8.0 or stronger and the seabed shifts in a way that moves a lot of water, the result is the high-energy waves of a tsunami.

The deeper the epicenter under the seabed, the less potential there is for a tsunami. In Sumatra, the depth of the epicenter was 49.7 miles, according to the United States Geological Survey. In Samoa, it was just 11.2 miles below the seabed. . The United States was concentrating its rescue efforts on American Samoa, sending two cargo planes from Honolulu to the area on Wednesday, said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We’re looking at both an airlift and a sealift,” Mr. Fugate told reporters in a conference call. “This will not be a short-term response.”

Peter Gelling reported from Padang, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong. Reporting was contributed by Norimitsu Onishi from Jakarta, Indonesia; Brian Knowlton and Jeff Zeleny from Washington; Meraiah Foley from Sydney, Australia; Neil MacFarquhar, Liz Robbins and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.