Relief workers struggled to reach Indonesian quake survivors still without food or shelter a week after the disaster, while foreign rescue teams packed up their high-tech equipment today and prepared to pull out.
Aid has been pouring into the shattered West Sumatran city of Padang since the September 30th earthquake, but the scale of the disaster, heavy rain and damaged infrastructure have meant it has been slow to reach outlying areas.
Helicopters are often the only way that some communities in the hills around Padang can be easily reached after landslides triggered by the 7.6 magnitude quake severed roads.
Work using heavy equipment to bring down half-collapsed buildings in Padang, a port city of 900,000, continued, despite fears many bodies may still be under the rubble.
There was a brief moment of hope yesterday when workers thought they had heard a woman crying for help under the rubble of the collapsed Ambacang hotel. But an Australian rescue team later turned up nothing.
Indonesia's official toll from the quake is 704 dead and 295 missing, but the health minister has said it could reach 3,000.
The regional Islamic council has issued a religious decree allowing the landslide areas to be declared mass graves.
More rescue teams from countries including South Korea, Singapore and Britain were starting to pack up and leave their base in the governor's house in Padang, as even the faint hope of finding more survivors in buildings reduced to rubble faded.
John Bugge, a spokesman for the charity Save the Children, said pneumonia was a key risk now, particularly for children lacking food and shelter in scattered communities around Padang.
Some schools have reopened, but according to Unicef about 1,000 have collapsed or been damaged.