Indonesia puts quake deaths at 68, with 12,800 people unable to go home
The air force has flown in 13 tonnes of relief and the province is under a 14-day emergency, but residents of one of the worst-hit towns say nothing has reached them.
Indonesia's national disaster agency raised the death toll from Saturday's earthquake in East Nusa Tenggara province to 68 on Monday, with more than 200 people injured, according to agency spokesman Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan.
About 12,800 people are unable to return home, Panjaitan said. The magnitude 7.7 quake damaged more than 1,300 houses across the province and destroyed nearly 250 of them on Flores island, and the provincial governor has declared a 14-day state of emergency.
The Indonesian air force has airlifted 13 tonnes of emergency supplies into the disaster zone.
Residents in the town of Mbay describe a different arithmetic. Junaidin, 32, said the houses there are cracked and collapsed to the point of being uninhabitable, and that no tents, medicine, food or drinking water had arrived from the government by the time he spoke — that people were, as he put it, on their own.
The gap between the two accounts is the standing problem of the first week after a large quake in an archipelago: relief is measured at the point it is loaded, not at the point it is handed over, and roads and airstrips on the outer islands decide which of those two numbers a household actually experiences.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the reference point for the country's disaster planning remains the magnitude 9.1 quake and tsunami of 2004, which killed about 220,000 people around the region, some 170,000 of them in Indonesia.