& # 039; We just ran & # 039;: the scale of the horror of the tsunami emerges in Indonesia
& # 039; We just ran & # 039;: the scale of the horror of the tsunami emerges in Indonesia
PALU, Indonesia Nurdiyah Rasid was performing evening prayers near the beach here when he felt the earthquake on Friday evening. He left the mosque and saw that the water of an adjacent canal was being dragged towards the sea.
Minutes later it re-emerged, she said, part of a powerful tsunami that hit the shore and came inland.
"We just ran," said Mrs. Rasid. "There were no sirens, no warning, only trembling and panic."
Authorities said they can find thousands more than the 1,234 people confirmed on Tuesday who died from the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and tsunami that followed. The waters increased to 20 feet in places, growing in size and speed as they moved through a narrow bay before crashing into the city of 380,000 people.
The rescue workers on Monday ran to remove the survivors from the rubble. The workers had already begun the task of placing the corpses side by side in a common grave.
A powerful earthquake and tsunami struck the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia on Friday, killing at least 800 people. Authorities fear that the death toll could rise significantly as many are still trapped under the rubble. Photo: Getty Images
Along the coast, debris was scattered on the beaches; In some areas of the interior, entire buildings seemed to be swallowed when violent tremors turned the ground into something like shifting sands, a phenomenon called liquefaction. Families ran for their lives as houses slid around them.
The land in the Patobo neighborhood in Palu turned into mud and sank 740 houses, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia's national disaster agency. "It happened on a large scale," he said.
In the Balaroa neighborhood, where 1,147 houses collapsed, the land sank to five meters in some places, while the earthquake elevated other areas by two meters or more, he said.
Homeless people, like Ms. Rasid, told stories of sudden devastation. A man in a coastal neighborhood said there were only a few minutes to react. "What I remember is that the ground finally stopped trembling ... and then you could see the waves breaking in the distance," he said. "It was the color of the ash, almost black."
Until Monday, authorities had received little news of what happened in the Donggala area, near the epicenter of the earthquake, where about 300,000 people live.
The telephone links closest to the epicenter remained sporadic at best on Monday and the roads to some severely affected areas were impassable.
As the magnitude of the disaster developed, the relief effort accelerated.
Throughout the day, relief aircraft made their way from nearby cities along with a handful of commercial flights. The United Nations aid agency estimated that 191,000 people on the island of Sulawesi, where the disaster occurred, needed humanitarian assistance.
The tsunami waters that hit the city of Palu, Indonesia, reached 20 feet in some places.
Photo:
jewel samad / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
The president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, authorized the acceptance of international aid, as neighboring nations such as Malaysia and Australia were ready to send rescue teams and other help. The United States has offered to send any assistance that is necessary, as well as China.
The government is flying both food and water, and fuel for generators and lifting equipment to help free survivors was on the way, said Thomas Lembong, head of the Indonesian Investment Coordination Board in Jakarta on Monday.
Time is the essence. Rescuers believed that there could be a large number of people still standing in the rubble of the collapsed buildings. According to authorities, up to 50 people could be trapped in the remains of the Roa Roa Hotel, where a 25-year-old woman was found alive on Sunday night.
Others were pulled from the rubble elsewhere, including a 15-year-old girl who was trapped when her family collapsed.
Elsewhere in the city, a mosque was partially submerged from the tsunami; an 820-foot bridge with bright yellow arches lay in ruins where it had once crossed the Palu River.
Residents looted supermarkets and other supply stores. At least 50 motorcycles were lined up in a damaged service station where their owners waited to fill the tanks.
"They're stealing it," said one viewer.
In some areas, the police stood guard at the banks.
After some convenience stores were looted on Sunday, Interior Minister Tjahjo Kumolo said the government would reimburse the owners for the losses.
At the airport in the city, hundreds of families camped, waiting for the opportunity to leave on one of the planes that brought help.
Rescuers from Indonesia work at the collapsed Roa Roa Hotel in search of survivors in Palu, in the center of Sulawesi, Indonesia, on Monday.
Photo:
irham mast / EPA / Shutterstock
Basrin Hamsar said that his house was almost completely destroyed and that his wife was hit by falling debris. His wound was beginning to smell; He brought his family to the airport hoping to get a flight. "It's totally dark at night and we're too scared to stay at home," he said.
Other Indonesians flew back to Palu to find their loved ones or find out what happened in their homes.
Jemmy Langelo had been in Jakarta on business; he booked a flight to Makassar on the southern tip of Sulawesi, the island where the disaster happened, and then got a seat on a military transport plane from Hercules.
His home, several miles from the ocean, survived in large part. "It's still standing but cracked in some places," he said.
Indonesia is located in the Ring of Fire, a series of faults and volcanoes that extend along the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and regularly suffer earthquakes and other national disasters.
After the 2004 Asian Tsunami killed some 228,000 people in the Indian Ocean, most of them in Indonesia, the region's authorities have struggled to maintain an adequate early warning system for tsunamis.
In the earthquake on Friday in Sulawesi, Indonesia, some buildings in the city of Palu were swallowed when the solid soil behaved like a liquid, a process known as liquefaction; other buildings collapsed in the earthquake or were hit by the tsunami that followed.
Photo:
Carl Court / Getty Images
The current Indonesian tsunami warning system, which involves a series of buoys deployed in the open sea, has not been operational since 2012. Some cables have been cut by ships passing through the boats or taken by fishermen for scrapping.
According to Louise Comfort, of the University of Pittsburgh, who was part of the initiative, a recent project to install new sensors that provide more warning time stalled this summer when the fall in the value of Indonesian currency left it out of reach of the budget allocated.
Even this system may not have provided sufficient warning for Palu residents. This time, the epicenter of the earthquake was only 50 miles north of Palu, which gave little time to prepare for the resulting tsunami.
Officials said they sent a tsunami warning via SMS and social networks five minutes after the earthquake. In many places, it seemed to have arrived too late or simply had not reached people. Telecommunications links in many areas had been eliminated by the earthquake, said Mr. Nugroho, the spokesman for the disaster agency.
In some areas, he said, people did not seem to realize that they need to get away from the coast and look for higher ground when an earthquake occurs.
Many survivors have begun to congregate around government buildings in a part of Palu that seemed less affected. By Monday, a tent city was taking shape in the garden of the governor's residence when humanitarian workers and other volunteers began to arrive.
Some of the displaced residents talked about seeing President Widodo tour the city the previous day. Ms. Rashid, who escaped the tsunami on the beach, showed a large bag of cooking oil, rice, tea and sugar that she had received during her visit to her camp.
As the numbers increased, those already there offered the newcomers hot chicken soup dishes.
-I did Sentana in Jakarta contributed to this article.
Write to Ben Otto in ben.otto@wsj.com
Correction
On Tuesday, it was confirmed that more than 1,234 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the number was confirmed on Monday. (October 2nd)
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