One week on, those whose homes were not flattened were picking through the
rubble, looking for whatever could be salvaged and fearing that disaster could
strike again.
"I still feel traumatized because one week later, we're still having
tremors," said Warno, a 39-year-old schoolteacher, as he and two other men
repaired the tiles ripped off his house in the village of Warung Boto.
"We all feel unsafe about sleeping inside," he said. "We need money to
rebuild our house."
While two of his children are healthy, his six-year-old daughter is still
vomiting and suffering from diarrhea, likely due to shock. Warno's 84-year-old
father died on Friday.
At least 6,234 people were killed, some 46,000 others injured and more than
139,000 homes in Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces either damaged or
completely destroyed.
"The height of the emergency phase will continue, I would expect, for another
week to two weeks, and at the most be completed in a month," said the UN's
Charlie Higgins, who is overseeing the relief effort in Java.
Foreign medical teams have set up field hospitals to ease the burden on local
facilities, but new casualties have continued to stream in.
"A lot of new patients with quake-related injuries came here," said Sunarto
from Bantul hospital. He had no immediate data available but said dozens had
been admitted, most of them suffering broken bones.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said the injured who had
been treated often had nowhere to go when they were discharged from hospital.
"Many patients have no homes to return to or are not prepared yet to go back
to their villages," IOM physician Nenette Motus said. The group said it was
trying to place people in rooming houses and small hotels.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which has warned of an increased risk of
the spread of infectious diseases, on Saturday launched a surveillance system to
detect any outbreaks.
Pujiono said WHO epidemiologists would follow a "rigorous procedure of
interviewing and observation" in the zone.
Both Indonesian officials and aid agencies said looting of aid convoys had
become a minor problem, with desperate survivors stopping trucks carrying food
aid on main roads before reaching the more remote villages.
Authorities in Jakarta dispatched assessment teams to the zone to determine
the exact number of dead and injured, with the social affairs ministry saying
"careful site checks" were needed to verify the current toll.
New figures would be available on Sunday at the earliest, said a ministry
official who identified herself as Dessy.