In Indonesia, 'let's be prepared for worst'

PADANG, Indonesia - As rescue workers searched for survivors in the wreckage of a four-story school yesterday, Mira Utami's mother clawed away, too - looking for the shoes missing from her daughter's body.

Mira was taking a high school English final when the quake hit, flattening the school and killing her a week before her 16th birthday.

"We had planned to celebrate . . . but she's gone," said her mother, Malina, weeping amid the wreckage where the barefoot body was found.

John Holmes, the United Nations' humanitarian chief, set the death toll at 1,100, and the number was expected to grow. Government figures put the number of dead at 777, with at least 440 people seriously injured.

Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake started at sea and rippled through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago.

An eerie quiet settled over Padang late yesterday as workers called off search efforts for the night. Thousands are thought trapped under shattered buildings in the city of 900,000, raising fears of a much higher death toll.

"Let's not underestimate. Let's be prepared for the worst," President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in the capital, Jakarta, before flying to Padang, a coastal city and West Sumatra province's capital.

President Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, pledged to support recovery efforts there as well as providing assistance in the South Pacific countries of Samoa and American Samoa, which were hit by a deadly tsunami Tuesday.

Most of the confirmed deaths in Indonesia were reported in Padang, where more than 500 buildings were severely damaged or flattened.

Where a mall once stood was a heap of concrete slabs layered like pancakes with iron rods jutting out. Police and army rescue teams used bulldozers, backhoes, and electric drills to clear the wreckage in intermittent rain, or climbed the hills of rubble to dislodge pieces of concrete with bare hands.

Relatives of the missing gathered outside ruined buildings, hoping to hear good news. But mostly, the rescuers found bodies.

Occasionally, they saved lives.

A Singaporean, John Lee, was pulled alive from the Maryani hotel after surviving under the rubble for 25 hours. Rescue workers, responding to his cries for help, dug for 12 hours to free him. Lee suffered only a broken leg.

Mira Utami, a sophomore, was taking an end-of-term exam along with classmates at the Indonesia-America Institute when the ground shook so severely that the tremors were felt in neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.

Her father, Zul, rushed to the school, but it was already a heap of concrete when he got there. Still, he pulled at the slabs and managed to save two other children and an adult, his wife said.

She said rescuers found their daughter's body much later, but her feet were bare.

"We are in a shock," sobbed Malina, wearing her daughter's brown veil and seeking other items to keep her connected to the girl. "We had planned to celebrate Utami's 16th birthday on Oct. 7. Now I don't know what we will do."

On the disaster-stricken Samoan islands yesterday, rescuers searched flattened homes and debris-filled swamps as more military ships and planes began arriving after an earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 150 people.

A Navy frigate carrying two helicopters and medical supplies arrived late Wednesday in American Samoa, and the Air Force dispatched two cargo planes. Australian officials said they would send an air force plane carrying 20 tons of humanitarian aid.

"This is a devastating earthquake and a devastating tsunami," Federal Emergency Management Agency coordinating officer Kenneth Tingman told reporters in American Samoa. "We know that power is paramount, but we are also doing lifesaving and life-sustaining efforts."

A magnitude-8.0 quake struck off the Samoan islands Tuesday. The islands soon were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high that reached up to a mile inland.

New Zealand schoolteacher Charlie Pearse choked back tears as she spoke to New Zealand's TV One News from an Apia hospital bed in Samoa, recalling how she was trapped underwater and thought she was going to die.

She was in the back of a truck trying to outrun the tsunami with about 20 children when a wave tossed the truck and it landed on top of them.

"We all went under the water, and I think a number of the children died instantly," Pearse said.

"I asked: 'Is this my time to come home? Take me home, I'm ready,' and I let my breath out and I took a big gulp of water . . . and I don't know, I just popped out [from under the water]."

A moderate earthquake followed by dozens of aftershocks shook the eastern Sierra yesterday, but no damage or injuries were reported.

The magnitude-5.0 temblor struck at 3:01 a.m. local time with an epicenter about 18 miles southeast of the Owens Valley town of Lone Pine, Calif.

More than four dozen smaller aftershocks including at least five that registered at magnitude 3.5 followed over the next five hours.

The quakes hit a rural area near Sequoia National Park, about 180 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The last destructive quake

to hit the Lone Pine area

came in 1872, when a temblor similar in size to the 1906 San Francisco quake killed about 30 people and leveled nearly all buildings.

- Associated PressEndText