Oct 2 2009
"Foreign emergency rescue teams are racing to reach earthquake devastated areas of Indonesia's Sumatra island, as the death toll continues to rise" after a 7.6 magnitude-quake struck earlier this week, VOA News reports.
"Medical teams, search dogs, backhoes and emergency supplies are already trickling into Sumatra. Rescue operations in and around Padang, the West Sumatran capital with a population of 900,000, have been slowed by power blackouts and a lack of heavy equipment to move massive slabs of collapsed concrete buildings," the news service writes. The U.S. said it would provide $300,000 in immediate aid and an additional $3 million later (10/2).
According to the New York Times, the "chaotic scene in the Padang" has been "compounded by short supplies of food and water." In addition, "many aid groups faced delays in reaching the disaster zone on Friday because flights to the area were full. Garuda Indonesia, the national carrier, said it planned to add flights to get emergency personnel to the area more quickly" (Gelling, 10/2). BBC also reported on relief operations, noting that "as rescue efforts focused on Padang, aid workers and reporters said that in rural areas thousands more buildings had been destroyed and whole villages flattened" (10/2).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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