PALU: The death toll from a powerful earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia leapt to 832 yesterday, as stunned people on the stricken island of Sulawesi struggled to find food and water and looting spread.
The new toll announced by the national disaster agency was almost double the previous figure. Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla said the final number of dead could be in the "thousands" as many regions have still not been reached.
"It feels very tense," said 35-year-old mother Risa Kusuma, comforting her feverish baby boy at an evacuation centre in the gutted coastal city of Palu.
"Every minute an ambulance brings in bodies. Clean water is scarce. The minimarkets are looted everywhere."
Indonesia's Metro TV yesterday broadcast footage from a coastal community in Donggala, close to the epicentre of the quake, where some waterfront homes appeared crushed but a resident said most people fled to higher ground after the quake struck.
"When it shook really hard, we all ran up into the hills," a man identified as Iswan told Metro TV.
Indonesian president Joko Widodo arrived in the region yesterday afternoon to see the devastation for himself.
In Palu city yesterday aid was trickling in, the Indonesian military had been deployed and search-and-rescue workers were doggedly combing the rubble for survivors -- looking for as many as 150 people at one upscale hotel alone.
"We managed to pull out a woman alive from the Hotel Roa-Roa last night," Muhammad Syaugi, head of the national search and rescue agency, said.
"We even heard people calling for help there yesterday."
"What we now desperately need is heavy machinery to clear the rubble. I have my staff on the ground, but it's impossible just to rely on their strength alone to clear this."
Meanwhile, the Thai embassy in Jakarta is examining ways to help Thai nationals who may have been affected by the disaster, according to a post on the embassy's Facebook page.
The post said the embassy in Jakarta and the office of the honorary consul-general in Denpasar, Bali, were working with the Thai conglomerate, Charoen Pokbhand Indonesia, to assess the situation and the possibility of evacuating Thais out of the areas hit by the quake and the tsunami.
The embassy earlier announced that 31 Thais in Palu were safe -- 28 students and three company employees.
The announcement said the Thai embassy had sought urgent help from the Indonesian government to help evacuate the Thais on a C-130 Hercules from Palu today.
