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.