Thousands of people are waiting for aid in the eastern Indonesia region hit by a powerful earthquake that killed dozens of people, as rescuers combed through collapsed buildings in search of people trapped beneath the rubble.
Late on Monday, the death toll was raised from 54 to 68, said Berton SP Panjaitan, an official at Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency, adding that more than 200 have been injured.
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Many residents on Flores island in East Nusa Tenggara province spent Monday searching for loved ones and waiting for aid to arrive in communities still cut off by the magnitude 7.7 quake.
During Indonesia’s Independence Day ceremony in the capital, Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto asked participants to pray for people affected by disasters in East Nusa Tenggara and other parts of the country while leading a nationwide moment of silence honouring the nation’s independence heroes.
More than 1,300 homes were damaged when the quake struck East Nusa Tenggara on Saturday. Nearly 250 were destroyed on Flores alone. Dozens of public buildings, including educational and health facilities as well as government offices, were also affected.
The province’s governor declared a 14-day state of emergency on Sunday.
About 12,800 people were unable to return to their homes by Monday morning and were dispersed among temporary shelters in several towns on Flores, Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan, spokesman for Indonesia’s BNPB national disaster agency, told the AFP news agency.
Thousands of people on Flores camped outside collapsed homes under tarpaulin tents overnight into Monday, sleeping outside because of the danger of more aftershocks.
“Our houses are no longer liveable because many have collapsed and are full of cracks, so we can’t go inside any more,” Mbay resident Junaidin, 32, told AFP outside his self-made tent that was sleeping about 30 people.
For many residents, the disaster revived painful memories of a powerful earthquake and tsunami that struck Flores in 1992, killing about 2,500 people.
“We’re on our own here,” said Junaidin, who like many Indonesians has one name. He expressed frustration with a perceived lag in the arrival of aid.
“As for help from the government, there hasn’t been any – no tents, no medicine, no food, no drinking water, nothing,” Junaidin said.
The Indonesian air force said it was bringing 13 tonnes of emergency aid airlifted in two Hercules transport planes and a Boeing.
It was also deploying helicopters to bring emergency supplies directly to survivors in isolated communities, the Antara state news agency quoted the commander of El Tari Air Base in Kupang on Timor island as saying.
The aid included food, clothes, clean water and emergency medical equipment.
The military has deployed personnel to help with distribution in key hubs.
Rescuers were combing the stricken area for victims despite not receiving any reports about missing people, search and rescue official Fathur Rahman told AFP on Monday.
Indonesia will also build an emergency field hospital in several areas to treat the injured, Deputy Health Minister Benjamin Paulus Octavianus said.
Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington, reporting from Ruteng in East Nusa Tenggara, said medical staff there had to quickly assemble a tent hospital after the hospital was damaged.
While doctors said they have a sufficient supply of medicine, they weren’t able to get to essential equipment that allows them to perform blood tests and X-rays, which means they are “having to treat patients in very difficult conditions”, Washington said.
Many elderly patients “are being exposed to the intense heat of the daytime” and the “rather cold” evening temperatures, which complicates doctors’ ability to treat them, Washington added.
Indonesia experiences frequent earthquakes due to its location along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.
A magnitude 9.1 tremor in 2004 struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, about 170,000 of them in Indonesia.
It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.