UP TO 5500 DEAD IN QUAKE

5000 to 5500 dead in quake as of 1:15 am may 29,06. 2-Quake rattles Bay homes.

Quake Toll Exceeds 4,500; Shocks Rattle Indonesia ,By PETER GELLING,Published: May 29

BANTUL, Indonesia, Monday, May 29 — Sugiarto, a 50-year-old chicken farmer, spent Sunday night lying immobile with a severe back injury at the edge of a crowded tarp outside Bantul General Hospital, his wife shielding his face as rain whipped down. In Bantul, villagers mourned on Saturday and prepared mass graves for victims of a powerful early morning earthquake that leveled buildings. Mr. Sugiarto said his back was broken when the roof of his house fell on him in the 6.3 magnitude earthquake on Saturday.

He was first turned away from the hospital because his injuries were not considered serious enough amid the devastation in Bantul, a district eight miles south of Yogyakarta where most of the deaths occurred.We returned to our mosque, where we sat out front and prayed, said his wife, Ngatinah, 43. We prayed all night in the rain. Neighbors drove them in a pickup truck. Like most people here, they refuse to stay inside, terrified of the aftershocks that come every few hours.Mr. Sugiarto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, was back at the hospital awaiting treatment for a second day in a row. He lay on nothing more than a plastic sheet next to the hospital parking lot.

The earthquake has killed more than 4,500 people, the Indonesian government said Sunday. The number of deaths is expected to rise as rescue workers search the rubble of collapsed buildings, and aftershocks continue to quiver through Yogyakarta and surrounding areas.
Mount Merapi, a volcano north of Yogyakarta, has been expected to erupt for the past few weeks, and it seemed to become more threatening on Monday morning, venting ever larger clouds of hot gas into the air, that then slid down its slopes. Volcanologists say the earthquake probably caused the increased activity in the volcano. The epicenter of the earthquake, which struck just before 6 a.m. on Saturday, was about 15 miles southwest of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of Java along the Indian Ocean, and about 6 miles below the surface. John Budd, a Unicef spokesman, said tens of thousands had been injured and at least 100,000 left
homeless, nearly half of them children.The issue of how efficiently help is coming to the quake's victims was raised Sunday, but aid workers here were quick to note that there was no comparison to be made between the relatively modest earthquake on Saturday and far more devastating quakes in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir last October, which killed 75,000, and in Iran in 2003, which killed 31,000, let alone the tsunami, which killed 181,000 people in Southeast Asia in 2004.

Two other earthquakes east of Indonesia were recorded Sunday, one off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and another near Tonga. No deaths or damages were reported.In Bantul, overwhelmed hospital employees working in blood-stained hallways teeming with sick and injured patients welcomed the arrival of emergency supplies Sunday night, though United Nations officials said they expected most of the aid to arrive Monday.Relief efforts have been stalled partly because the Yogyakarta airport is closed, after its runway was cracked and a terminal building partly collapsed. Aid workers have been diverted to nearby airports in Solo and Semarang.Limited emergency air service was expected to resume Monday at the airport, but it would still be a day or two before it could support any sustained traffic, officials said.Apart from the airport, however, Yogyakarta's infrastructure was mostly intact, allowing the government and aid agencies to get help to the area relatively quickly.Military trucks carrying supplies from the central government thundered past the lush rice paddies of the area's farming communities
Sunday night from the capital, Jakarta, 250 miles west of Yogyakarta. Yolak Dalimunte, in charge of disaster response for the Indonesian Social Welfare Ministry, said supplies of tents, food, beds and clothing were beginning to arrive in Bantul, where a command center had been set up to coordinate relief efforts.Puji Pujiono, the lead officer for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that although the government had yet to officially request United Nations assistance, the agency had been talking to local officials and had set up a communications center next to the Bantul mayor's office.

The next 36 hours are going to be a logistical nightmare, he said. "We have a small pipeline where a lot of aid is being pumped through. We are going to face a bottleneck if we don't figure this out soon.Mr. Pujiono said a meeting was planned among aid groups and the Indonesian government to help coordinate rescue efforts.Other aid officials said the Indonesian government had so far responded efficiently to the earthquake.

The response from the government has been electric and focused," said Mr. Budd of Unicef, who was to meet with the Indonesian finance minister and other United Nations agencies on Monday to assess the extent of the damage in Yogyakarta. "They assessed what was required and responded quickly. At Bantul General Hospital, where pieces of the roof were missing and walls were fissured, Mercy Corps, a disaster relief group, was distributing supplies and assessing patients' needs. Liha, a spokeswoman for Mercy Corps who goes by one name, said relief needed to come faster because the hospital was rapidly running out of antibiotics, anesthetics, bandages and, most urgently, food. Most people are suffering from bone fractures, but what we really need is food supplies, she said, standing amid a crowd of bloodied people clamoring for help.

Most of these people haven't eaten since the earthquake. In Jetis, an area in Bantul, more than 300 houses were leveled. Neighbors climbing over a wrecked house spotted the bodies of a
family of three and began frantically digging them out Sunday morning. But no amount of effort could free the bodies from the layers of debris. Hours later, the neighbors were still waiting for military personnel to help. The bodies remained buried and were not part of the official death toll until well into the evening Sunday. In sweltering heat, residents of Jetis carried all the belongings they could salvage to a central location Sunday afternoon, where they divided them among the neediest.I am devastated, said Prapto Warsito, the village leader for Jetis, who sat at the side of the road surrounded by rubble, holding a cardboard box for donations.

Quakes rattle Bay homes, 29.05.2006

The earth moved for many Hawke's Bay people last night - and not just once, but twice. A magnitude 3.1 earthquake centred 10km west of Napier rattled Bay homes at 10.34 last night. Just a few hours later, we were treated to an a early wake-up call when another earthquake rippled across the region at 4.23am - measuring 3.9 on the Richter Scale. The Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, Wellington, received 13 reports from people around Hastings and Napier via its Geonet website link, where people can send an e-mail on their experiences with earthquakes.

Seismologist, Dr Ken Gledhill, said the first earthquake was centred 12km under Napier and the second, 20 kilometres south east of Havelock North. Both were felt throughout the Hastings and Napier regions. Dr Gledhill said neither this morning's shake - or the tremor reportedly felt in Onekawa at 10.34pm yesterday - were big enough to be picked up by any of the major seismic stations or strong motion stations placed inside buildings to measure the shaking effect of earthquakes. But information gathered from various earthquake measuring instruments from around the North Island, plus reports from the public, helped provide data on the earthquakes.

Dr Gledhill said it was not unusual for the Hawke's Bay region to record two or three earthquakes a month. In the bigger scheme of things, it was a minor earthquake," he said. It was just below the threshold ... where our duty person would have been notified," he said. This morning's earthquake follows three others recorded in the Hawke's Bay region since April. An earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter Scale was felt 10km south east of Otane, on May 20, at 3.23pm. Another was recorded on April 27, south east of Dannevirke, measuring 3.5 and an earthquake measuring 3.8 was centred 10km south east of Waipawa on April 18.