PALU: Nearly 400 people were killed when a powerful quake sent a tsunami barrelling into the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, officials said on Saturday, as hospitals struggled to cope with hundreds of injured and rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.

The national disaster agency put the official death toll so far at 384, all of them in the tsunami-struck city of Palu, but warned the toll was likely to rise. Some 540 people were badly injured, it added.

In the city — home to around 350,000 people — partially covered bodies lay on the ground near the shore, the day after tsunami waves five feet high hit the coast.

There were also concerns over the whereabouts of hundreds of people preparing for a beach festival that had been due to start Friday evening, the disaster agency said.

Hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of injured, with many people being treated in the open air, while other survivors helped to retrieve the remains of those who died.

The tsunami was triggered by a strong quake that brought down buildings and sent locals fleeing for higher ground as a churning wall of water crashed into Palu, where there were widespread power blackouts.

The initial quake struck as evening prayers were about to begin in the world’s biggest Muslim majority country on the holiest day of the week, when mosques are especially busy.

Dramatic video footage captured from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80 kms from the quake’s epicentre, showed waves bring down several buildings and inundate a large mosque.

About 17,000 people had been evacuated, the disaster agency said, and that figure is expected to rise.

The shallow 7.5 magnitude tremor was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and August.

“This was a terrifying double disaster,” said Jan Gelfand, a Jakarta-based official at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “The Indonesian Red Cross is racing to help survivors but we don’t know what they’ll find there.”

The massive tremors were felt hundreds of kilometres away and there has been little word about casualties in Donggala, a region north of Palu where at least one person was reported dead in Friday’s quakes.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2018