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Hopes fade for Indonesia quake survivors
Sun Oct 4, 2009 1:22am EDT
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By Razak Ahmad and Sunanda Creagh
PADANG, Indonesia (Reuters) - Rescue teams combing the rubble in the shattered Indonesian city of Padang said on Sunday there was little hope of finding more survivors of a massive earthquake that authorities say may have killed 3,000 people.
As relief workers pushed deeper into earthquake-hit Sumatra they found entire villages obliterated by landslides and homeless survivors desperate for food, water and shelter.
"I am the only one left," said Zulfahmi, 39, who was in the village of Kapalo Koto with 36 family members when Wednesday's 7.6 magnitude quake triggered a landslide, about 40 km (25 miles) north of Padang.
"My child, my wife, my mother-in-law, they are all gone. They are under the earth now."
Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadillah Supari, told Reuters by telephone that the government estimated the death toll could reach 3,000, adding that disease was becoming a concern, especially in Padang city, where a pervading stench of decomposing bodies hangs over the ruined buildings.
"We are trying to recover people from the debris, dead or alive. We are trying to help survivors to stay alive. We are now focusing on minimizing post-quake deaths," she said.
In Padang, a university city of 900,000, rescuers were picking through collapsed buildings to look for perhaps thousands of people still buried under the rubble.
"We are doing final checks before we can declare the rescue phase is over. We think it's the end of the rescue phase," said British rescue worker Peter Old, of Rapid UK.
"There's very little chance of finding people alive. It's the beginning of a ramping down in rescue work."
Hopes were also fading of finding survivors in the ruins of the Dutch-colonial era Ambacang Hotel, a landmark in a town famous across Indonesia for its spicy cuisine and dramatic curved roofs.
A person believed to be trapped in the building, where an insurance company was holding a seminar, sent a phone text message Friday to a relative saying that eight people were still alive in the ruins.
Rescuers including a Swiss team and sniffer dogs from Japan were cutting through layers of concrete, but by late on Saturday afternoon had managed to retrieve only one more body.
SCALE OF THE DISASTER
In remoter areas, the scale of the disaster was still becoming clear, with at least five villages swallowed by landslides.
"In the villages in Pariaman, we estimate about 600 people died," said Rustam Pakaya, head of the Health Ministry's crisis center. Pariaman, closer to the epicenter, is one of the worst-affected. Continued...
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