In Disaster’s Grip, Again and Again, on Indonesian Island

The sun was setting on the mosque in Sigi, and Randi Renaldi, 7, knelt and reached his fingers out in supplication. Then the ground beneath him juddered and swayed.

The mosque crumpled, the dome came crashing down, and a concrete slab slammed down on Randi’s outstretched hands.

At the same moment in the same district on the central coast of Sulawesi Island, Priska Susanto, 15, had just finished praying on her first day of 10th-grade Bible camp. She was snacking on fried bananas at the Patmos church compound.

Here, the ground did not tremble as much as churn, melting into a terrifying sludge that heaved and dragged the church for a mile, and, finally, swallowed the building up to its roof and spire.

The starfish-shaped island of Sulawesi in Eastern Indonesia, which just a week ago suffered a 7.5-magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami that crested over electricity poles, is a place of divided faiths. It is also a place where catastrophe after catastrophe, both natural and man-made, have been inflicted on Muslims and Christians alike.

In little more than half a century, Sulawesi has endured dozens of earthquakes, landslides, floods, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions; anti-Communist pogroms that claimed at least half a million lives nationwide; and sectarian strife that culminated in the heads of schoolgirls deposited near a church and police station.

At least 1,649 people have been confirmed killed by the twin natural disasters on Sept. 28. Many more are believed to have died, been buried under soil, swept away by waves or trapped in a tangle of crushed buildings that will take months, if not years, to clear.

Each day, dozens of corpses are stuffed into body bags and interred in mass graves. A week in the tropics means that expediency trumps ceremony.

For three days, the national disaster agency put the number of missing at an improbable 113. Suhri Noster Norbertus Sinaga, the spokesman for the National Search and Rescue Agency, said that figure did not correspond with reality, as local officials had not yet provided any population data for affected areas.

Then, on Saturday, the estimate was increased to 256, and that, too, is unlikely to be anywhere near the final number. In just one of the neighborhoods visited by journalists for The New York Times, Petobo in the city of Palu, search and rescue workers estimated that thousands of people lay deep in the earth.

“We have only searched a small part of Petobo, and there are already so many bodies,” said Syamsul Rizal, the head of a national search and rescue unit from southern Sulawesi.

At the collapsed church in Sigi, volunteers from the Indonesian Red Cross dug their shovels into layers of mud and rubble to extract the bodies. So far, 36 people, mostly children, have been confirmed killed when an earthquake-induced phenomenon called liquefaction transformed loose soil into a land tsunami.

The body of one girl at the Bible camp, Resky Senolingga, 15, was discovered nearly 10 miles away on the beach in Palu. No one is sure how she got there.

Nearly 60 children and teachers were still missing from the Christian camp, the Indonesian Red Cross said. As of Friday, their staff had only reached 7 of the 15 subdistricts in Sigi — and the remaining eight were the more difficult to get to.

(NY Times)