The rescue efforts in Indonesia are slowing as the likelihood of anyone being found alive after the earthquake and tsunami diminishes.
Volunteers have been burying those killed in a mass grave as the death toll reaches 1,571.
British humanitarian experts are on the ground in Sulawasi helping to co-ordinate the response, and a plane with supplies including shelter kits and water purifiers arrived on the island on Friday.
Sky’s Jonathan Samuels is in Indonesia, where families are desperately searching for bodies to bring home.
A week on from the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami and now the sad reality is that no one realistically expects anyone else will be pulled alive from the rubble.
The pressure on rescue teams now is to recover bodies.
We came across a restaurant and internet cafe, now completely collapsed. Last Friday teenagers were here playing video-games and staff were preparing meals.
One of the waitresses was 17-year-old Eda Rapisa. When the quake hit she was crushed under the rubble, her legs trapped and badly injured. But, she was alive.
Her father stayed with her day and night, feeding her and giving her water. When she screamed in pain he reassured her telling her she would be okay.
When help finally arrived, Eda was told that a surgeon needed to amputate both her legs, right where she lay. Then the teenager was pulled free, to much jubilation, despite the horrific trauma she had endured.
She was rushed to hospital, but tragically, she died two days later.
Her uncle Andre K Tandi told me: “I’m angry because the rescuers took so long to come. She was alive, she could have survived.”
The reality is the city was ill-equipped to cope without enough excavators and digging machinery to deal with the scale of the disaster.
“She was really friendly, a nice person, a really outgoing person,” her uncle says as we stand on the street looking at the destroyed building.
He tells me she was working as a waitress during the holiday before starting college in a few weeks’ time.
Four children died in the internet cafe and seven people died in the restaurant.
One week on and six bodies remain inside.
The smell of death permeates onto the busy road.
Even the retrieval of the dead seems to be taking an intolerable amount of time.
From – SkyNews
