PADANG PARIAMAN, Indonesia — The man had driven 12 hours to his hometown in this central Sumatran district, the area closest to the powerful earthquake that struck off Indonesia’s western coast on Wednesday, because he heard his village had ceased to exist.
A collapsed building in Padang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island. More Photos »
“I heard people say Padang Pariaman was destroyed,” the man, Sutan Maskuri, 55, a beef satay seller, said Friday afternoon as eight villagers raised a makeshift stretcher over their shoulders to hoist Mr. Maskuri’s injured sister around a road wiped out by a landslide.
In the end, Mr. Maskuri found that five of his siblings had died in a landslide set off by the earthquake. He sent the injured sister to a regional hospital in his own Toyota because, he said, he could not rely on the government. “No one’s been here, no soldiers, no police,” he said some 44 hours after the disaster began.
Padang Pariaman, with 375,000 inhabitants scattered throughout the district, had survived, though almost all of its houses had suffered some damage, their wooden frames and corrugated roofs twisted in fantastic shapes.
About 50 miles to the south, in Padang, the closest large city, rescue workers raked through rubble beneath a scorching sun, but admitted they were finding few survivors. By some estimates, more than half of the city’s buildings had collapsed in the quake, which had a magnitude of 7.6, and the Indonesian Health Ministry announced that nearly 3,000 people might still be trapped in the rubble.
Many of Padang’s 900,000 residents left the city; others stocked up on emergency supplies and fuel, convinced that another, larger earthquake was imminent, even as electricity slowly began to be restored.
On Thursday morning, about 16 hours after the first temblor, a 6.6-magnitude aftershock did hit, about 140 miles southeast of Padang. It appeared to cause few casualties and little damage.
But on Friday, the authorities still knew little about the situation in hundreds of villages across Padang Pariaman, the most severely affected area on the island of Sumatra. That is one reason government officials predicted that the death toll would rise considerably beyond Friday’s official figure, 715. United Nations officials estimated 1,100 people had died.
A number of countries have pledged financial aid. The United States Embassy in Jakarta said it had already provided $300,000 and had set aside $3 million more. But many aid groups faced delays in reaching the disaster zone because flights were full. Garuda Indonesia, the national carrier, said it planned to add flights to get emergency personnel to the area more quickly.
No military or relief vehicles could be seen Friday on the road from Padang. Long lines at gas stations created massive traffic jams even as black marketeers sold gas at more than four times the normal price.
In the town of Padang Pariaman, the administrative center of the district that shares its name, the district leader, Muslim Kasim, said that up to 80 percent of all buildings in the countryside had been damaged. Officials had already counted 13,750 homes, 30 office buildings, 69 schools and 128 mosques as damaged, he said, and confirmed 207 deaths. He said the authorities believed that at least 282 more people still lay buried in landslides.
Herry Ardyanto, the police chief, said the difficulty in getting information about remote regions was compounded by the residents’ reluctance to leave their villages “even if there is no electricity or water.”
A narrow road breaks off from the center of the town of Padang Pariaman and ascends gently toward Koto Timur, the subdistrict that includes Mr. Maskuri’s village. On the way, most houses lay damaged or destroyed. In Koto Timur, the road came to a stop at a two-story house, now partly flattened by a landslide.
When the quake struck, the wife and four children of a man named Aguslier leapt outside just as the family’s house was about to fall. On Friday, Mr. Aguslier’s children were carrying cooking utensils out of the ruins to a neighboring house.
“I’m collecting the wood to build a temporary shelter,” said Mr. Aguslier, 36, who like many here uses only one name.
All the villagers were fending for themselves. Syafrie, 40, whose mother and younger sister had died in the quake, was walking around the landslide with a box of instant noodles under his arm.
“Our families living outside here brought us water and noodles,” Mr. Syafrie said. “We haven’t seen a single rescue worker yet.”
As he walked toward his house, the eight village men carrying Mr. Maskuri’s sister, Rosmanidar, 57, approached from the opposite direction. They climbed up a muddy hill left by the landslide and cut through a rice paddy to get around another landslide. They eventually let her down in front of the village convenience store where a crowd gathered, children looking on curiously, one woman with tearful eyes talking to the injured.
After a few minutes, they placed Rosmanidar inside Mr. Maskuri’s black Toyota minivan. He watched as his driver steered the car out of the village, and then Mr. Maskuri returned to his ancestral home, where two of his siblings still lay buried by a landslide.
As if on cue, police trucks arrived, for the first time, less than half an hour later. A small, white police helicopter appeared in the sky, hovering above the tall palm trees, lowering itself twice just above two fields.
The villagers waved and yelled. But the helicopter flew away. It was only doing a survey, a police officer said. Aid would come the next day, he said, at the latest.
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