Indonesia's New Mourning

For the past month the citizens of Yogyakarta have warily watched Mount Merapi, an active volcano 25 km from the ancient Indonesian city. Scientists warned that Merapi was ready to erupt, and thousands of villagers living on its slopes were evacuated as a precaution. So far Merapi hasn't blown. Instead, Yogyakartans discovered on Saturday that the real danger was the ground beneath their feet.

At 5:54 a.m. the city of 3.2 million was rocked by a 6.2-magnitude earthquake that struck offshore, just 24 km to the southwest. Feeling the tremor, thousands of families fled into the streets and rushed for high ground, fearing another tsunami like the one that killed some 170,000 Indonesians in December 2004. "Everybody, young and old, ran up the hill for safety," says Ismambandiah, a middle-aged woman caught in the quake. The fatal waves never came, but the temblor wreaked havoc on Yogyakarta and surrounding communities, killing at least 3,000 and leaving tens of thousands more injured and homeless. It is the country's worst natural disaster since the tsunami. The most horrific damage occurred in the district of Bantul, south of the city, where the tremor pulverized hundreds of houses, burying sleeping families beneath the rubble. Those lucky enough to escape dug for survivors with their bare hands. Electricity and phone lines throughout much of the city were disrupted, and Yogyakarta's airport was temporarily closed due to damage, diverting much-needed relief flights. Makeshift ambulances picked their way along cratered roads to hospitals and clinics choked with the injured. Nurses laid the wounded in folding beds outside the buildings, for fear of aftershocks. Even more crowded were the morgues, which filled with the dead until corpses spilled over into the hallways. "I didn't have time to count how many died," says Damai, a nurse at a small clinic in Bantul whose uniform is stained with blood. She is ready to cry, as much from exhaustion as sorrow. "We haven't stopped working since morning." A grim benefit of the weeks of worry over Merapi was that emergency personnel and supplies were already in place. And the tsunami had given many of them gruesomely practical experience in rapid relief operations. But for all the city's preparedness, Yogyakarta's trauma may not be over. Mount Merapi was disturbed by the quake, and heavy clouds of ash and debris erupted in the hours that followed. But even if Merapi remains silent, the country still sits on one of the most geologically unstable patches of the earth, part of an earthquake-prone area called the Ring of Fire. For Indonesia, natural catastrophe has come to seem all too natural.