Indonesia, October 04: In rural areas of Indonesia, weddings are communal, open-air affairs. Some 400 people attended the nuptials of a couple in Pulau Aiya, a village outside Padang, last Wednesday.
Then the ground shook and swallowed everyone up.
“They were sucked 30m deep into the earth,” Rustam Pakaya, head of the Indonesian Health Ministry’s crisis centre, said yesterday. “Even the mosque’s minaret, more than 20m tall, disappeared.”
Three days after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake devastated Padang and surrounding areas on the west coast of Sumatra, the full impact of the tragedy is starting to become clear.
Whole villages were found obliterated yesterday by rescuers pushing deeper into the disaster zone, where roads remain cut off and survivors – still desperately awaiting aid – are subsisting on coconut milk.
–Agencies