Indonesia Tsunami survivors found on island

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Rescue workers have found 135 individuals on a remote indonesian island five days after a ravaging tsunami hit the western mentawai islands, killing leastwise 416 individuals.

Amidst rough seas and monsoon rain, the group was found hiding on high ground on saturday, too afraid of another wave to come back to their shattered villages.

The number of missing was nearly halved from 298 to 163 following saturday’s invention, but officials had kept out little hope of finding some of the missing after flights over the area earlier in the week revealed dozens of unclaimed bodies strewn across beaches and wedged in rubble.

“we’re so grateful that we’ve found some of the missing individuals – we’d been working very hard to find them,” joskamatir, a tragedy management official, told the afp news agency.

Al jazeera’s wayne hay, reporting from the worst-hit south pagai island, said that it has proved extremely unmanageable to reach outlying areas due to the rough seas.

“it is a scene of finish devastation and individuals in the area are trying to sort through the rubble, trying to find the bodies of their friends and families,” he said.

“before help came i survived by eating whatever we could find, such like taro,” theopilus, 42, a farmer in south pagai, said.

“we’re in dire need of more feed, tents and blankets. I feel in truth cold at night as it rains all the time. “

Various tsunami-relief volunteers were also found safe after their boat sank off south pagai.

“they were with regards to to help victims with the electricity in a hard-hit area. They were determined to go in spite of the bad weather,” surya, a tragedy management official, said.

Vulnerable coastal areas

Susilo bambang yudhoyono, the indonesian president, visited tsunami survivors on thursday and said that the “only long-term solution” was for individuals to move away from the most vulnerable coastal areas.

His remarks also come amidst questions on whether an costly warning scheme – established after the massive 2004 asian tsunami, which killed leastwise 168,000 individuals in indonesia alone – had failed.

Tsunami survivors have said they had nearly no warning that the wall of water was bearing down on them, in spite of a sophisticated network of alarm buoys off the sumatran coast.

While an official tsunami warning was apparently issued just after the earthquake, it either came too late or didn’t reach the communities in most danger.

Indonesia straddles a region where the meeting of continental plates causes high seismic action. It has the world’s largest number of active volcanoes and is shaken by thousands of earthquakes annually.

A 7. 6-magnitude earthquake last year in padang killed with regards to 1,100 individuals, triggered by a 9. 3-magnitude quake along the same fault line that caused the 2004 asian tsunami.

Source: aljazeera