Padang picks up the pieces

6 Oct 2009, 6:48 am   -   Source: AFP
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The traumatised people of Padang began piecing their shattered homes and businesses back together, hoping that painful lessons would be learnt ahead of the far bigger quake that seismologists say is coming.

The traumatised people of Padang began piecing their shattered homes and businesses back together, hoping that painful lessons would be learnt ahead of the far bigger quake that seismologists say is coming.

Excavators and bulldozers are still raking over the concrete and steel mounds that mark the spots where hotels, schools and homes once stood in a vast clean-up operation expected to take months.

Elsewhere, in some neighbourhoods, signs of life are returning.

Streets are being swept, debris collected and some businesses reopened.

"I keep feeling the quake shaking my body and I can't stop worrying about it," said 60-year-old Yusnidar, who decided on the weekend to re-open her restaurant which serves Padang's famous Rendang beef.

"I'm sleeping by the door at the moment so that if another quake comes I can rush outside as quickly as possible."

Her eatery, the Ampera Taman in central Padang, is quiet, with only a few people sat at the six tables.

"I am quite lucky because my restaurant building wasn't damaged," she said, gesturing towards the market on the opposite side of the road that is partially collapsed and burnt in places.

Yusnidar, like others here, has heard the predictions by seismologists of the "big quake" that is set to hit Padang, but approaches it with a fatalistic attitude that is typical in this conservative, Muslim-majority town. "I won't move from this city. I just accept what is written by God," she says.

"The thing that is important is that we have awareness that if a quake happens we should run outside and if there's a tsunami alert then we have to go to the hilly area."

Unfortunately for her and the rest of the 900,000-strong population of Padang, the 7.6-magnitude quake centred off the coast from the port city on Wednesday evening was not the major quake seismologists have predicted.

It occurred underneath the Indo-Australian plate, rather than at the meeting point of the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate where strain has been building and is expected to be released at some unknown point in the future.

The United Nations has said that at least 1,100 people were killed in the disaster, but estimates of the final toll range up to 5,000. "This earthquake today is a flea compared to this tiger of a quake that is coming," California Institute of Technology (Caltech) geologist Kerry Sieh told AFP last week.

Back in central Padang, Syamsinar, a 78-year-old mother of four, is selling furniture and cigarettes on the pavement outside her cracked and partially collapsed furniture store.

"Who's going to buy furniture in these conditions?" she told AFP, adding that she had no choice but to stay in Padang.

"I don't have enough money to move away," she said. Padang native Sribersihwati, 30, said she hoped builders and the local government would recognise the mistakes made in the development of the city, which has boomed in recent years.

"There should be regulations and strong monitoring from the local government regarding the construction of buildings," Sribersihwati told AFP.

"The corruption problem is a concern.

Why are there so many tall buildings that didn't bother with strong construction? They built the buildings with low-quality materials," she said.

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