PADANG — Johnson Chandra can’t believe that a short SMS message has saved his life. "At first I thought, 'Oh it's just a small one'," Chandra told Reuters on Saturday, October 3.
The 30-year-old was trapped with his wife under the rubble of their four-storey house since a 7.6 magnitude earthquake jolted Padang, the capital of Sumatra, on Wednesday.
"Please help, I'm trapped, my position is in the house by the stairs," helpless Chandra tapped a short message to his father in Jakarta, 900 km away.
The father immediately called the emergence services and apprised them off the place of his son and his wife under the rubble.
"Later I heard people coming. So I tried to make a sound," Chandra recalled.
"My wife kept shouting 'help', and I found a small nail and started banging it.
"They finally found me. Slowly they broke concrete around me, and I was later rescued 10 hours after the quake."
More than 1,100 people were killed and thousands remained trapped under the rubble after the powerful quake jolted the region.
Chandra recalled the first moment that the quake shook the region.
"The ground kept moving so I tried to run outside,” he said.
But the Indonesian man remembered that he left his wife behind.
“I turned around, heading to the stairs," he said. "As soon as I stepped my foot on the first step, bricks rained on me, and I couldn't stand, I was swaying, losing my balance.
“Within two seconds, the whole building crashed, the third floor became the first floor. Everything went dark then."
Chandra, who ended up beneath a door holding back the fallen masonry above, tried to call for help on his mobile phone, but the signal went dead.
"I tried to call people up, my family, my friends, my relatives to no avail, and I was desperate. But I suddenly thought about texting, so I texted my dad to let him know where I was.”
Buried Villages
Rescuers continued to struggle on Saturday to get thousands of helpless Indonesians from under the rubble.
"In my village, 75 people were buried," Ogi Martapela, 28, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The bereaved man has lost his older brother in a quake-triggered landslide that obliterated their village.
"There are about 300 people missing from this whole area. We need tents and excavators to get the bodies but the roads are cut off."
Many villages in Sumatra have been entirely obliterated by landslides that followed the quake.
In the city of Padang, rescuers were still combing through collapsed buildings for thousands of people buried beneath the wreckage.
"We estimate about 3,000 to 4,000 people are still trapped or buried under the rubble," said UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Indonesia El-Mostafa Benlamlih.
But the rescue operations were hampered by destroyed roads, landslides and lack of resources.
"The difficulty in this rescue operation is that the houses are buried under the soil as much as four metres deep," a rescue officer named Topan told AFP.
"So far we have been using our hands to dig up the soil."
Indonesia has appealed for foreign aid as the stench of decomposing bodies indicated that many trapped in the wreckage have already perished.
Source: IslamOnline
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