PADANG, Indonesia (AlertNet) - International rescue teams have called off the hunt for survivors buried under rubble in an Indonesian city hit by earthquakes a week ago.
Aid efforts in Padang, a city of 900,000 on the island of Sumatra, have switched from a rescue mission to supporting thousands of homeless survivors.
On Wednesday, relief agencies handed out medical aid and plastic sheets for shelters, diggers knocked through badly damaged buildings and the homeless tried to salvage their belongings from the rubble.
The flow of traffic had picked up and restaurants and shops had begun to reopen.
Clive Hodgson, chief executive of the British search and rescue group RAPID UK, told AlertNet that the group's 16-man team had left Padang on Monday after scouring the rubble for survivors for 48 hours with their specialist equipment.
"In consultation with the United Nations coordination centre it was agreed that the urban search and rescue operation had come to an end," he said. "We withdrew to allow others working on the relief effort to operate."
Indonesia's government has said that more than 700 people have died in the earthquake. With hundreds of people still missing and many outlying villages still out of contact, this figure is likely to rise.
The RAPID UK team arrived in Padang from Britain last Saturday morning, around 72 hours after the main earthquake. Hodgson said that his team had not managed to find anyone alive under the ruins.
Some of the worst-affected areas are villages around Padang where mudslides destroyed houses and blocked roads. A United Nations report said that in some regions 70 percent of the buildings were now uninhabitable.
Adjie Fachrurrazi at CARE said remote areas in the district of Padang Pariaman had suffered the most damage.
"In the rural areas, people are saying to us, Â?donÂ?t count the number of houses destroyed. Count the number of houses left standing - it will be fasterÂ?," she said in a statement.
Aid helicopters are flying missions to reach the villages cut off by landslides.
And they are racing against time. The rainy season has begun and one of the main priorities is to hand out plastic sheets to give survivors some shelter.
"The scale of the disaster is a bit of a question mark right now," said Dominique Morel from the Catholic Relief Services mission.
"There are still a lot of unknowns but what is apparent is the damage in the villages which has affected shelter."
(Additional reporting and writing by James Kilner in London)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
