By Irwan Firdaus
The Associated Press
PANGANDARAN, Indonesia — Tearful parents searched for missing children Tuesday, as soldiers pulled corpses from the debris of homes flattened by the second tsunami to hit Indonesia in two years. At least 341 people were killed, officials said, with more than 200 missing.
A government minister said Indonesia received warnings that Monday’s powerful undersea earthquake had the potential to trigger a tsunami, but it did not try to pass them on to threatened communities.
Bodies covered in white sheets piled up at makeshift morgues, with several others lying beneath the blazing sun on a popular tourist beach, a 6-month-old baby among them.
“I don’t mind losing any of my property, but please God return my son,” said Basril, a villager who goes by one name, as he and his wife searched though mounds of rubble at the once idyllic Pangandaran resort on Java island’s southern coast.
The area hit by Monday’s wave had been spared by the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami, and many residents said they did not even feel the 7.7-magnitude undersea quake that unleashed the 6-foot-high wall of water.
But some recognized the danger when they saw the ocean recede and fled to higher ground, screaming “Tsunami! Tsunami!” A black wave shot to shore a half hour later, witnesses said, sending boats, cars and motorbikes crashing into resorts and fishing villages. The water reached 300 yards inland.
The death toll rose to at least 341, Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare Aburizal Bakrie said, with another 229 missing and feared dead.
“We are still finding many bodies, many are stuck in the ruins of the houses,” local police chief Syamsuddin Janieb said as soldiers nearby pulled the body of a toddler from the mud and washed it for burial.
Most of those killed were Indonesians, but a Pakistani, a Swede and a Dutch citizen were among the dead, local and consulate officials said.
At least 42,000 people fled their homes, either because they were destroyed or in fear of another tsunami, adding to difficulties to add up causality figures, other officials said Tuesday.
Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman said Indonesia received warning bulletins from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and Japan’s Meteorological Agency after the quake, but “we did not announce them.”
The warnings were sent about 45 minutes before the tsunami struck.
Even if the government had tried to contact local authorities by phone, radio or e-mail, it’s unclear how those warnings would have been passed along to residents or tourists on the beach with no system of sirens or alarms in place.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla said no warning was issued locally because most people fled inland after they felt the earthquake, fearing a tsunami.
“After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills ... so in actual fact there was a kind of natural early warning system,” he told reporters in Jakarta.
Coastal residents reported that they did not feel the earthquake.
At the main regional emergency center, the Banjar Public Hospital, doctors and nurses scrambled to treat a steady stream of patients — most from the Pangandaran coast. Some slept on dirty mattresses on the floor, while others were treated in the admissions hall amid a bustle of family members searching for loved ones.
Among a handful of foreign patients was Hamed Abukhamiss, a 40-year-old Saudi who lost his wife and 4-year-old son.
Enormous waves separated the family as they enjoyed an afternoon of surfing, shopping and eating at a Pangandaran waterfront cafe.
Abukhamiss, who suffered minor injuries, said he told himself as he was repeatedly sucked under the current and battered by debris: “I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to die.”
His other son, Yousif, 12, saw the wave approaching with a pair of binoculars, but no one believed him when he yelled, “Tsunami!”
Indonesia was hardest hit by a 2004 tsunami that killed at least 216,000 people in a dozen nations along the Indian Ocean rim — more than a half of them on Sumatra island’s Aceh province.
Though the country started to install an early warning system after that disaster, it is still in the early stages, covering only Sumatra. The government had been planning to extend the warning system to Java by 2007.
The island was hit seven weeks ago by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 5,800 people, though the 110 miles of coastline hit by Monday’s tsunami was not affected by that temblor.
Monday’s quake struck at 3:24 p.m. about 150 miles beneath the ocean floor, causing tall buildings to sway hundreds of miles away in the capital, Jakarta. The region was rattled by a series of strong aftershocks.
Indonesia is on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.