PALU: The number of people believed missing from the quake and tsunami that struck Indonesia’s Palu city recently has soared to 5,000, an official said on Sunday.

Indonesia’s disaster agency says it has recovered 1,763 bodies so far from the 7.5-magnitude and subsequent tsunami that struck Sulawesi on September 28.

But there are fears that two of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods in Palu — Petobo and Balaroa — could contain thousands more victims, swallowed up by ground that engulfed whole communities in a process known as liquefaction.

“Based on reports from the [village] heads of Balaroa and Petobo, there are about 5,000 people who have not been found,” agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told reporters on Sunday.

“Nevertheless, officials there are still trying to confirm this and are gathering data. It is not easy to obtain the exact number of those trapped by landslides, or liquefaction, or mud.”

Nugroho said the search for the unaccounted would continue until October 11, at which point they would be listed as missing, presumed dead.

The figure drastically increases the estimates for those who disappeared when the disaster struck 10 days ago. Officials had initially predicted some 1,000 people were buried beneath the ruins of Palu. But the latest tally speaks to the considerable destruction in the worst-hit areas of Petobo and Balaroa as the picture on the ground has become clearer.

Petobo, a cluster of villages in Palu, was virtually wiped out by the powerful quake and wall of water that devastated Palu. Much of it was sucked whole into the ground as the vibrations from the quake turned soil to quicksand. It was feared that beneath the crumbled rooftops and twisted rebar, a vast number of bodies remain entombed.

In Balaroa, a massive government housing complex was also subsumed by the quake and rescuers have struggled to extract bodies from the tangled mess in the aftermath of the disaster.

Hopes of finding anyone alive have faded, as the search for survivors morphs into a grim gathering and accounting of the dead.

“This is day ten. It would be a miracle to actually find someone still alive,” Muhammad Syaugi, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said on Sunday.

Muhlis, whose uncle was still missing in Balaroa, said the missing and dead should be honoured respectfully. “There should be a monument here to make people aware, so that our grandchildren will know this disaster happened in 2018,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2018