Indonesia quake toll tops 6,200

BANTUL, Indonesia — The death toll has continued to climb from the 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck this region on Saturday, but most of the increase now is from the deaths of people who had been severely injured, a U.N. official said Thursday.

The Indonesian Social Affairs Ministry said the toll had reached more than 6,200 dead, with more than 46,000 injured, 33,000 of them seriously.

Search and rescue efforts ceased on Tuesday. John Budd, a spokesman for the U.N. Children's Fund, said that on average there had been 400 to 500 deaths a day since Tuesday. He said these had occurred in overwhelmed hospitals.

At Bantul General Hospital, which has been treating the most seriously injured victims, conditions were much improved on Thursday. The military has been transporting patients with minor injuries to hospitals in Yogyakarta — eight miles north of Bantul, the hardest-hit district — and to nearby field hospitals.

All of the patients at Bantul General now have beds, a major improvement since the weekend, when bleeding victims lined the floors inside the hospital and slept on the wet ground beneath tarpaulins in the parking lot.

Foreign and Indonesian doctors were busy at Bantul General on Thursday, and an aid worker from the relief group Mercy Corps said the group now had enough supplies of bandages, anesthetics and antibiotics, which staff members were feverishly distributing from a corner of the hospital.

But many patients were still waiting for surgery. Officials at the hospital said it was able to perform only about 18 operations a day, while several hundred additional patients, largely from remote areas, had arrived on Wednesday and Thursday.

Family members of some of the injured people said they were anxious because different doctors were giving differing diagnoses and proposing differing treatments.

Some seriously injured patients who arrived were sent on to hospitals in Yogyakarta and in some extreme cases as far as Solo, about 110 miles away. "Patients with head wounds, those who are losing consciousness especially, have to be transferred, because we don't have the equipment to treat them," a hospital official said.

Surat's situation highlighted the need for coordination between the visiting doctors and hospital staff. Hidayat said patients should follow the assessments of Indonesian doctors, because the foreign staff is here only temporarily. It is the Indonesians who will have to follow up, he said.

"Coordination is difficult, because it is so chaotic and there are so many people helping and needing help," Hidayat said. "I understand the foreign doctors want to help immediately, but we need to try and set up some amount of coordination."

Almost 100 miles north of the confusing scene at Bantul General Hospital, the threat of another looming catastrophe, the imminent eruption of Mount Merapi, seemed to lessen.

Subandriyo, director of the Merapi division of the Volcanology Center in Yogyakarta, said the volcano's activity had been decreasing since Tuesday and had returned to its pre-quake levels.

A volcano alert remained at its highest level, meaning that an eruption could happen at any time, but there appeared to be less danger than there had been the day after the quake, when hundreds of deadly hot clouds were vented and several lava streams flowed down its slopes.

"Activity has decreased at Mount Merapi," Subandriyo said. "There were no lava streams Thursday. But some villages are still being evacuated, because the danger still exists."