PADANG, Indonesia: Fresh international earthquake aid flowed into Indonesia on Tuesday as schools and shops re-opened amid the stench of death from bodies still trapped beneath the rubble.
At the crumpled Ambacang Hotel in the city center, excavators briefly ceased digging when workers thought they heard a woman’s cries for help, but a search revealed no further signs of life.
“There’s no one alive. I stopped all the machinery to ensure that the family of the victims were satisfied,” the commander of the clean-up operation, Haris Sarjana, told AFP.
Another 10 bodies were pulled from wreckage around Padang, including six from the Ambacang, provincial disaster management operation head Ade Edward said.
“We’ve also started to spray disinfectant to get rid of the stench and are clearing up the debris using heavy machinery,” he added.
In the rugged hills to the east and north of the city, hundreds of people remained buried beneath massive landslides that swallowed villages when the 7.6-magnitude quake struck off the coast of western Sumatra last Wednesday.
A Red Cross official said the final death toll would exceed 3,000, although the national Disaster Management Agency put the latest toll at 704, with 295 missing.
Between 170,000-200,000 homes were damaged, with about half this number completely destroyed, said Bob McKerrow, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Indonesia. Helicopters dropped vital supplies to cut-off farming communities which relief workers could not reach by road.
