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BANDA ACEH - Military ships rushed to get desperately needed aid to the ravished coast of Sumatra island on Thursday, as villages strewn with bloating corpses remained isolated for a fifth day after a huge earthquake and tsunami devastated the region. Though health experts warned that contaminated water and rapidly dwindling food supplies were a bigger danger, officials here focused on the grisly task of disposing of the masses of the dead.
Countless corpses remained strewn around the city streets, rotting in the tropical sun and causing a nearly unbearable stench. Bulldozers pushed 1,000 bloated bodies into mass graves on Wednesday, officials said. The government's tally put the death toll from Sunday's earthquake and tsunami at 45,268 in Indonesia alone, with another 1,240 people reported missing. All of the Indonesian deaths were on Sumatra.
Gauging the scale of the tragedy remains difficult, however. On Sumatra's west coast, which was closest to Sunday's magnitude 9.0 quake, communications were down and many roads have been blocked by debris or washed out by the deadly tsunamis. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was to hold a meeting of his top Cabinet advisers Thursday and was then expected to fly to Sumatra for a second time to inspect the damage. Town after town on the coast was covered in mud and sea water.
Homes had their roofs ripped off or were flatted by the forces of the disaster. Villagers scavenged for food on the beach. "The damage is truly devastating,'' said Maj. Gen. Endang Suwarya, the military commander of the island's Aceh province, who toured the coast by helicopter. He said 75 percent of the west coast was destroyed, with some places completely wiped out. The area around the town of Meulaboh - a fishing village of 40,000 residents - bore the brunt of the earthquake.
Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, estimated that 10,000 people had died in Meulaboh. Only 3,400 of them have been included in the official toll because the rest haven't been properly counted. The tolls from many other towns are also yet to be added in. Dozens of doctors began arriving in this city on Wednesday to set up four emergency hospitals. But access remained a major problem.
"We can only reach a quarter of the western coast,'' Dr. Doti Indrasanto said Wednesday.
"We've got piles of food and medicine and we can't get it through to these places.'' There were signs of progress, however. Electricity and cellular phone service had returned in some parts of Banda Aceh. But the government estimated it would cost US$150 million (euro110 million) to rebuild the province in the coming year and more than US$1 billion (euro735 million) over the next five years. The quake adds to political woes that have long plagued Sumatra.
Aceh province, on the northernwestern end of the island, has been wracked by a separatist war for the past 26 years. Jakarta had banned foreign journalists and international aid groups from visiting the region, but lifted the ban Monday and said it would welcome aid.
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indahnesia.com lists all earthquakes that occur in Indonesia. For your convenience we display them in a list and a Google Map. It is as accurate and recent as you can imagine as we check for updates every few minutes. If an earthquake occurs in Indonesia, this is the place to check it out in the first place.
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