6A
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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NEWS
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2005
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EARTHQUAKE
Buyung Tiendra/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Residents sit near a house damaged by earthquake in Nias island, Indonesia, yesterday. The small Indonesian island bore the brun of an 8.7-magnitude undersea earthquake that struck late Monday, burying an unknown number of people beneath their homes as they collapsed three months after a massive temblor in the same offshore region west of Sumatra sent tsunami waves crashing into a dozen countries on the Pacific Ocean's rim, killing more than 174,000.
Death toll rises in Indonesia
BY CHRIS BRUMMITT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia
— His brown eyes puffy and bloodshot, Datot Mendra prepares to spend the night lying next to his wife.
Today he will bury her — and his sister and two other relatives.
"What will I tell my children?" the 55-year-old restaurant owner says. "I can't face it. My faith in Jesus is helping me through this."
Mendra's wife was among some 20 bodies wrapped in white sheets, while candles flickered at their heads. They were laid out on the street outside the Santa Maria church in this town on Indonesia's predominantly Roman Catholic Nias Island.
Most of the deaths from Monday night's 8.7-magnitude
More were arriving. Groups of four men approached, each holding the corner of a sheet with another body.
While the scene outside the church was almost serene, elsewhere on this island of 600,000 people the atmosphere was anything but. Rescue workers working by candles and flashlight hunted through smoldering rub-
earthquake in the Indian Ocean were on Nias, 75 miles south of the epicenter. By yesterday's end, the island's death toll stood at about 330, but government officials said it could climb as high as 2,000.
An unidentified official from nearby Aceh province told Indonesia's Metro TV that about 100 people also died on neighboring Simeulue island. Both islands are just west of Indonesia's much larger Sumatra island.
Dave Jenkins, a New Zealand physician who runs the relief agency SurfAid International in western Sumatra, said he feared for about 10,000 people living on the tiny Banyak Islands, close to the quake's epicenter. By late last night, contact had not been made with the islands.
ble for survivors in flattened buildings. Power was out, and electric cables lay, tangled in the street.
Little heavy machinery was available, so families frantically searching for loved ones used crow bars and their bare hands to lift heavy chunks of concrete.
Smoke drifted out of piles of rubble and concrete homes where walls had folded in on themselves. They almost certainly crushed to death anybody caught inside. A steeple had fallen from a church.
Although most of Indonesia is Muslim, Christianity persists in some areas — a vestige of Dutch colonization. The Nias islanders, particularly the well-organized southern villages, initially put up strong resistance when the Dutch tried to take control. But the Dutch finally conquered the island in 1909, and then Nias slowly started to convert to Christianity.
Monday's quake, which stuck an hour before midnight, toppled
every building in the main street of Gunung Sitoli, a church-studded seaside town that is the island's largest.
A soccer field in the center of town and close to the palm-fringed Indian Ocean beach was transformed into a triage center where a dozen seriously injured islanders, some of them unconscious, were lying on doors salvaged from wrecked homes. They waited, hoping that a relief agency helicopter would be able to airlift them to a hospital on Sumatra.
"Four people here might not make it through the night!" yelled one of the few Western aid workers to arrive in the town Tuesday. "Do you have space on a chopper?"
Elsewhere, two boys sat next to their wounded mother, and a man stood next to his wife, holding the bag for her intravenous drip.
People swarmed around U.N. helicopters as they landed to deliver relief supplies, but food and water were in short supply.