Indonesia tsunami toll hits 343 as bodies found
Indonesia An official says the death toll from a tsunami off western Indonesia has risen to 343 as more bodies are found in a search of the remote islands that were hardest-hit.
Ferry Faisal, of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management agency, raised the official toll Thursday to 343 from 311 earlier in the day. He says 338 people are still missing.
Rescuers fear the numbers could climb higher, suspecting many of the missing may have been swept away to sea.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
MENTAWAI ISLANDS, Indonesia (AP) – Rescuers searching islands ravaged by a tsunami off western Indonesia fear the death toll of more than 300 is likely to climb because hundreds of missing people may have been swept away, officials said Thursday.
An island rescue official who survived the wave described villages flattened down to their foundations, while elsewhere in Indonesia, villagers held a mass burial for some of the 33 people killed when one the country’s most volatile volcanos erupted.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was to meet Thursday with survivors of the twin catastrophes, which struck within 24 hours in different corners of the seismically charged region, severely testing his disaster-prone nation’s emergency response network.
Officials say a multimillion dollar warning system installed after the monster 2004 quake and tsunami broke down one month ago because it was not being properly maintained.
In the tsunami-ravaged Mentawai islands, search and rescue teams – kept away for days because of stormy seas and bad weather – found roads and beaches with swollen corpses lying on them, according to Harmensyah, head of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management center.
Some wore face masks as they wrapped corpses in black body bags on Pagai Utara, one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain located between Sumatra and the Indian Ocean. Huge swaths of land were underwater and houses lay crumpled with tires and slabs of concrete piled up on the surrounding sand.
At least 311 people died as the tsunami washed away hundreds of wooden and bamboo homes in 20 villages, displacing more than 20,000 people, said Ade Edward, a government disaster official.
Harmensyah said the teams were losing hope of finding the more than 370 people still missing since the wall of water, created by a 7.8-magnitute earthquake, crashed into the islands on Monday.
