Quake Wiped Out Entire Villages

As rescue workers searched for survivors in the wreckage of a four-story school Thursday, Mira Utami's mother clawed away, too - looking for the shoes missing from her daughter's body.

Mira was taking a high school English final when the quake hit, flattening the school in seconds and killing her a week before her 16th birthday.

"We had planned to celebrate ... but she's gone," said her mother, Malina, weeping amid the wreckage where the barefoot body was found.

John Holmes, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief, set the death toll at 1,100, and the number was expected to grow. Government figures put the number of dead at 777, with at least 440 people seriously injured.

Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake started at sea and quickly rippled through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago.

An eerie quiet settled over Padang late Thursday as workers called off search efforts for the night.

"More than 50 percent of the buildings are collapsed," Padang resident Joseph Tanto told..
Thousands are thought trapped under shattered buildings in the city of 900,000, raising fears of a significantly higher death toll when the debris is cleared.

"Let's not underestimate. Let's be prepared for the worst," President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in the capital, Jakarta, before flying to Padang, a coastal city and West Sumatra province's capital.


At least four Indonesian villages were obliterated by earthquake-triggered landslides that buried as many as 644 people including a wedding party under mountains of mud and debris, officials said Saturday.

The full extent of Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake was becoming apparent three days later as aid workers and government officials reached remote villages in the hills along Sumatra island's western coast.

If all 644 are confirmed dead - as is likely - the death toll in the disaster would jump to more than 1,300. The government's death toll currently is 715, with most casualties reported from the region's biggest city, Padang, where aid efforts are currently focused.