SMS offers hope, death stalks rescue effort
SMS offers hope, death stalks rescue effort
Victor Tjahjadi, Agence France Presse/Gunung Sitoli
No heartbeats have registered on their high-tech listening gear
and the smell of death seeps ominously from the debris, but a
telephone text message pleading for help from beneath the ruins
is enough to drive the rescuers on.
As steady drizzle poured onto the earthquake-devastated island
of Nias, Capt. Cera Tan and her nine-strong team from Singapore's
Civil Defence Force pulled grimly at wet chunks of concrete,
hoping for a miracle.
"We have been working for an hour trying to evacuate these
people," Tan told AFP as she scrambled over the rubble and mud of
a street smashed to pieces when Monday's 8.7-magnitude earthquake
hit the Indonesian island of Nias.
"We can see the body of a person, but we cannot really be sure
whether they are alive or not," she said wearily.
Normally, Tan and her team would have moved on, hunting for
locations where there is more hope of finding people still alive
and following rumours of people still talking from under the
piles of concrete.
But as she rushed to Nias from Jakarta in the hours after the
quake, Rita Ghani, a relative of the family buried here, received
a mobile phone text message saying her sister was still
conscious.
"My sister last night sent an SMS to her friend here saying
that she was still alive and asked to be rescued," Gani said. "I
am glad that there is still a slight hope that there is someone
still alive."
Captain Tan's team were brought to the crushed house, near the
Nou main market in the Nias city of Gunung Sitoli, by Rita and
other relatives of the Ghanis who had been struggling with basic
tools to uncover the family.
She said that five people -- Fransiskus, 52, his wife Susanti,
52, their children Melani, aged 14, and 12-year-old Alexander,
along with their maid Lina, 20 -- were believed to be trapped.
The team quickly unpacked sophisticated sonar equipment which
can detect even weak heartbeats beneath the debris. Worryingly,
they heard nothing.
"Earlier on, we tried using a life detector but unfortunately
we did not detect any movement," said Tan. The workers
nevertheless decided to press on with the rescue, she said.
"We are using an airbag, mechanical equipment that can
partially lift the debris, to enable us to have more space to
work," she said.
As scores of people watched, a Range Rover pickup truck
equipped with a winch heaved away some of the larger chunks of
debris to help the rescuers scramble into the space beneath.
But as they got closer to finding out the Ghanis' fate, Rita's
fleeting optimism ebbed away.
"I am already resigned to their death, and my tears have
already been drained yesterday," she said.