By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The counting started Saturday and hasn't stopped. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake tore through Flores, a predominantly Catholic island in Muslim-majority Indonesia, and by Sunday rescue crews were still pulling bodies from collapsed buildings and landslide debris.
Indonesia's national disaster management agency puts the toll at 51 dead, though the count was rising through the weekend — the Guardian reported at least 47 confirmed Sunday, with more than 100 injured. At least 24 people died in Manggarai regency alone, with 17 more in neighboring East Manggarai. Additional deaths were reported in Sikka, Ngada and Ende regencies. More than 1,300 homes have been damaged and roughly 5,000 people displaced, according to Al Jazeera.
Searches are underway across six regencies on the island, where landslides triggered by the shaking buried roads and, rescuers fear, people. It is one of the deadliest earthquakes to hit Indonesia in years — a grim distinction in a country that sits astride the Pacific's Ring of Fire and knows the drill better than most nations ever should.
What happens next depends on logistics as much as luck: how fast diggers and dogs can reach isolated villages, how much more rain falls on already-unstable slopes, and how long international aid takes to arrive. None of that has been settled yet. The number 51 is not final.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera and The Guardian.
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