Indonesia quake toll tops 4,500

BANTUL, Indonesia — Sugiarto, a 50-year-old chicken farmer, spent Sunday night lying immobile with a severe back injury at the edge of a crowded tarp outside Bantul General Hospital, his wife shielding his face as the rain whipped down.

Sugiarto, who said his back was broken when the roof of his house fell on him in Saturday's 6.3 magnitude earthquake, was turned away from the hospital because his injuries were not considered serious enough here in Bantul, a district eight miles south of Yogyakarta where most of the deaths occurred.

"We returned to our mosque, where we sat out front and prayed, we prayed all night in the rain," his wife, Ngatinah, 43, said, neighbors ferrying them in a pickup truck. Like most people here, they refuse to stay inside, terrified of the aftershocks that come regularly every three or four hours.

Sugiarto, who was back at the hospital awaiting treatment for a second day in a row, lay on nothing more than a plastic sheet set next to the hospital parking lot.

The earthquake has killed more than 4,500 people so far, the Indonesian government said Sunday. The number of fatalities is expected to rise as rescue workers search the rubble of collapsed buildings, and aftershocks continue to quiver through Yogyakarta and surrounding areas.

Mount Merapi, a volcano north of Yogyakarta, has been expected to erupt imminently for the past few weeks, and seemed to become more threatening Monday morning, venting ever larger clouds of hot gas into the air, that then slide down its slopes. Volcanologists say the earthquake has likely triggered the increased activity in the volcano.

The epicenter of the earthquake, which struck just before 6 a.m. on Saturday, was about 15 miles southwest of the ancient city of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of Java along the Indian Ocean, and about six miles below the surface.

John Budd, a spokesman for the U.N. Children's Fund, said tens of thousands more have been injured and at least 100,000 have been left homeless, nearly half of them children younger than 18.

The issue of how efficiently help is coming to the quake's victims was raised Sunday, but observers here were quick to note that there is no comparison to be made between Saturday's relatively modest earthquake and far more devastating quakes in Pakistan and Iran, let alone the 2004 tsunami, in which 170,000 people died.