Surviving the Padang Quake: 'Disasters Are Following Us'

Throughout the month of Ramadan, residents of Padang had felt the small, swaying quakes. But this one was different — a sharp vertical drop that nearly slammed Hafifa to the floor. "I grabbed the kids and ran but I could hardly stand," said Hafifa, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name. On Thursday night, the day after a 7.6 earthquake hit this city of 900,000 in western Sumatra, Hafifa and her husband Rizal were with their children at the Padang airport, waiting to buy tickets to Jakarta. Eight months ago, the couple moved here from Aceh, the northwestern tip of Sumatra where 130,000 were killed in the 2004 Asian tsunami. Now, the survivors have had enough. "Disasters are following us everywhere we go," Rizal said. See pictures of the quake.

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The earthquake-prone city of Padang always knew that it could be next. The U.N. estimates that 1,100 people have been killed in two earthquakes that hit Padang and the surrounding area this week, but rescue efforts are far from over. The Indonesian Health Ministry told the Associated Press that the official death toll stood at 715 on Friday, but at least 3000 people are still believed to be buried in Padang, which had the most casualties in the region, and six other districts.

After the tsunami devastated coastal communities across Asia five years ago, a local NGO in Padang started to educate residents on what to do if a tsunami was heading their way. Part of the drill? Head downtown to the high rises, and take shelter there. There was no tsunami warning this week; the undersea quake hit deep enough not to trigger a deadly wave. But most of the structures that Padang's residents had been advised to go to collapsed, including almost all of city's local government buildings, hotels and restaurants.

By Friday afternoon, rescue workers' attempts to reach potential survivors were moving slowly in downtown Padang due to a shortage of heavy machinery to move the rubble. Most of the victims in the city were killed when the plush Ambacang Hotel, where several functions were being held, collapsed. The only known survivor, a 20-year-old woman named Friska Yurianita, was at a training seminar at the hotel when the building fell on top of her. "I felt pain all over my body, and I thought I was dying," said Yurianita at the Dr. M. Djamil Hospital, where she was being treated for injuries. "Only the next morning, I saw people starting digging out debris, and I started yelling for help." She had been buried in the rubble for about 19 hours.

That hospital, like the rest of the region, still had no running water or electricity on Friday, and doctors, surgeons and nurses were in equally short supply. Since half the hospital collapsed in the quake, patients have been staying in makeshift rooms in military tents outside the building. Leni, a 30-year-old woman from nearby Sincin village, says it was raining hard when she brought her 70-year-old mother into the hospital around 7 p.m. the night of first earthquake. With a broken arm and two broken legs, her mother was not seen by a doctor until noon the next day. "There was no one to help," Leni said, crying. "The nurses could only help patients who were having difficulty breathing." (Read more about the damage done by the Indonesian quake.)

With many roads still blocked and fuel in short supply, aid is still trickling into the devastated region. The Indonesian government has committed about $10 million to the relief effort; even the Vice President's jet was commandeered to fly in emergency supplies. More than a dozen other governments have also offered aid, including an immediate pledge of $3.3 million from the United States. With thousands of islands strewn across a volatile fault zone, Indonesia is often shaken by earthquakes. But the past few years have proven particularly deadly. Following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, a 2006 earthquake hit the metropolis of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, killing more than 5,000 people. (A day before Padang was jolted, a South Pacific earthquake triggered a tsunami around the Samoan islands and Tonga, killing more than 100 people, but scientists are expressing reservations that the two sets of seismic activity along the so-called Ring of Fire were related.)

Hafifa and Rizal, the couple from Aceh, are not the only ones who want to move to more stable ground. Outside the Padang airport on Thursday night, taxis were lined up for kilometers to ferry nurses, aid workers and supplies into the area. But inside the airport, the terminal was crowded with people trying to leave. Planes coming and going for the next week were fully booked. "We are going back to Jakarta to stay with our relatives," said Rizal. "To calm down."

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