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Sumatra quake
'levelled villages'
BBC, 3 October 2009
Thousands of people may have died in remote village areas when a powerful
earthquake struck Sumatra last week, emergency workers and officials fear.
Some villages were completely destroyed in landslides, with access roads torn apart by the quake preventing medical
teams reaching the injured.
Aid is now arriving in Indonesia, but hopes are fading of finding survivors in the worst-hit city of Padang.
More than 1,000 people have died in the city. About 3,000 others are missing.
Australian, British, Japanese and South Korean rescuers have arrived in Indonesia and the EU and Russia are also
sending help.
But while rescue efforts are still concentrated in Padang, there are serious concerns that it may be too late to
save most of those missing, presumed trapped beneath the city's collapsed concrete buildings.
Instead the focus is shifting to emerging stories of widespread destruction in areas outside the city.
At least 600 people are believed to be missing in villages north of Padang.
"All the houses seem to have been swallowed by earth," a health ministry official in the village of Pulau
Aik told the Associated Press.
Villagers contacted by reporters told of hundreds of people missing in each settlement.
"In my village, 75 people were buried. There are about 300 people missing from this whole area. We need tents
and excavators to get the bodies but the roads are cut off," one villager, Ogi Martapela, told Reuters.
One Red Cross worker, Testos, told Reuters his team needed medicines, drinking water and clothes to take to those
left homeless by the quake.
But access to these areas remains difficult, and few details are known yet of the extent of the destruction or
the loss of life.
Local TV stations have begun to reach some of the affected areas, broadcasting images of villages reduced to rubble
and tales of villagers without access to clean water.
"We have not received a thing. We need food, clothes, blankets, milk. It seems like the government has forgotten
about us," Reuters quoted one woman, Siti Armaini, as saying in Pariaman, 40km (25 miles) north of Padang.
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