PADANG, Indonesia - As rescue workers searched for survivors in the wreckage of a four-story school yesterday, 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 UN humanitarian chief, set the death toll at 1,100 and said 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 yesterday as workers called off search efforts for the night. 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.
President Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, pledged to support earthquake recovery efforts there as well as providing assistance in the South Pacific countries of Samoa and American Samoa, which were hit by a deadly tsunami Tuesday.
Most of the confirmed deaths in Indonesia were reported in Padang where more than 500 buildings were severely damaged or flattened.
Where a mall once stood was a heap of concrete slabs layered like pancakes with iron rods jutting out. Police and army rescue teams used bulldozers, backhoes and electric drills to clear the wreckage in intermittent rain, or climbed the hills of rubble to dislodge pieces of concrete with bare hands.
Relatives of the missing gathered outside ruined buildings, hoping to hear good news. But mostly, the rescuers found bodies.
Occasionally, they saved lives.
A Singaporean, John Lee, was pulled alive from the Maryani hotel after surviving under the rubble for 25 hours. Rescue workers, responding to his cries for help, dug for 12 hours to free him. Lee suffered only a broken leg.
One of the hospitals in the town had collapsed completely while the state-run Djamil Hospital was partly damaged - its walls cracked and windows broken. Staff at the hospital treated the injured in tents set up in the open. In another area, rows of yellow body bags were laid out in rows.
