Rough seas hinder tsunami aid

MENTAWAI ISLANDS, Indonesia — A group of private aid workers battled fierce swells and driving rain that kept most craft on shore Friday, managing to deliver food and other supplies to desperate survivors on the islands hardest hit by a tsunami that killed more than 400 people.

Government agencies pulled back boats and helicopters that had been ferrying aid to the most distant corners of the Mentawai islands and instead resorted to airdropping boxes of aid from planes.

On a borrowed 75-foot cruiser, aid workers faced rough seas and sheets of rain, plus miserable seasickness, to take noodles, sardines and sleeping mats to villages that have not received any help since Monday’s earthquake. In one village, most people were still huddling in a church in the hills, too afraid to come down even to get the aid.

Dozens of injured survivors of the tsunami, meanwhile, languished at an overwhelmed hospital Friday. They lay on mats or the bare floor as rainwater dripped onto them from holes in the ceiling and intravenous tubes hung from plastic ropes strung from the rafters.

“We need doctors, specialists,” nurse Anputra said at the tiny hospital in Pagai Utara, one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain slammed by the tsunami, which was triggered by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake.

Inside the tiny hospital, a man cradled his screaming son as staff tended to the child’s broken arm. The 35-year-old described how his two other young children were ripped from his embrace by the towering wave and sucked out to sea.

Health workers also cared for a newly orphaned 2-monthold boy found in a storm drain. The infant, with cuts on his face, blinked sleepily in a crib. Hospital workers named him Imanual Tegar. Tegar means “tough” in Indonesian.

The toll from the earthquake and the tsunami it spawned rose to 443 on Friday as officials found more bodies, and 303 people were still missing and feared swept out to sea, said Agus Prayitno of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management center.

Officials say 13,000 survivors on the islands are homeless. Many were sorely in need of help, which the government was struggling to deliver.

While tons of aid has reached the islands’ main towns, many farther-flung villages are accessible only by foot or sea because roads are too old or damaged for large trucks. Storms, however, have made the waters too dangerous for small boats, West Sumatra Gov. Irwan Prayitno said. Even when seas calm down, another official said, the government hasn’t been able to gather enough boats to address the scale of the disaster, making do with just a few dozen wooden boats with outboard motors.

Despite the challenges, a group of 50 private aid workers did set out by sea in a 75-foot vessel Friday for villages along the southern coast of South Pagai.

Soon after the wave-breaking boat set out, it became apparent why other vessels had been kept back. Nearly all the 50 relief workers on board were ill from the pounding waves and the deck had to be hosed off at one point after people threw up.

Still, the mission was able to bring the first help to the village of Limu, where dozens of houses were destroyed, some swept off their foundations, and dead chickens littered the shoreline.

Villagers eagerly grabbed the boxes of sardines and noodles and the sleeping mats the workers delivered, though many were too terrified to come down to the beach. There were no deaths in Limu, but one person was injured.

Government teams also delivered food, mostly instant noodles, by dropping it out of Hercules planes. Local television footage showed survivors running to pick up the boxes.

Four days after the tsunami crashed into the Mentawai islands off Sumatra, details of survivors’ misery and new accounts of the terrifying moments when the wave struck were still trickling out from the area, which was cut off by rough seas for nearly two days after the tsunami.

A group of surfers told of watching in horror as a roaring wall of water crossed a lagoon and slammed into their threestory thatch-roofed resort. The power of the wave shook the building so hard they feared it would collapse. All 27 people at the resort survived, five of them by clinging to trees.

Hundreds of miles from the tsunami zone, a volcano on the island of Java that killed 35 people this week erupted five more times Friday, sending searing clouds of ash cascading down its slopes. No more casualties were reported as the number of refugees swelled to 47,000.

The number of dead from the two disasters, which struck within 24 hours of each other, has now reached 443. Officials said two more people died of burns from Tuesday’s blast, bringing the volcano’s death toll to 35.

Information for this article was contributed by Achmad Ibrahim, Slamet Riyadi, Irwan Firdaus and Kay Johnson of The Associated Press.