Whole villages in Indonesia's quake zone have been found obliterated by landslides, as rescuers search desperately for up to 4,000 people believed still trapped in the disaster area.
The extent of the damage from Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake is becoming clear as attention turns to the hundreds of villages in the hills outside Padang.
In Padang, where hardly a single building has been left undamaged, rescuers are racing against time to haul any survivors from schools, hotels and homes that have been reduced to tangles of concrete and rubble.
Foreign rescue teams with sniffer dogs and infra-red equipment are being deployed to help overwhelmed and underequipped Indonesian emergency crews.
‘We estimate about 3,000 to 4,000 people are still trapped or buried under the rubble’, UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Indonesia El-Mostafa Benlamlih said.
The UN has said that at least 1,100 people died in the disaster while the government toll, which has not been revised since Thursday, stands at 777 but it has said it expects the figure to go much higher.
Indonesia has appealed for foreign aid yesterday as the stench of decomposing bodies indicated that many trapped in the wreckage have already perished.
Experts said that with specialised crews now arriving, there were some chances of still finding survivors providing their injuries were not too serious.
One lucky survivor was 20-year-old Ratna Kurnia Sari, who was pulled limp and covered in dust from the ruins of a college on Friday after spending more than 40 hours buried beneath rubble.
The quake struck off Sumatra's west coast northwest of Padang on Wednesday, on a major faultline on the volatile Ring of Fire that scientists have long warned was a disaster waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, an earthquake registering over 6 on the Richter Scale has hit eastern Taiwan, but no damage has been reported.
Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau put the magnitude at 6.3, but the US Geological Survey measured it at a revised 6.1.
The tremor hit in the early hours of Sunday morning (6.36pm today Irish time) and was reportedly strong enough to wake people in the capital Taipei.
