An 84-year-old woman has been found alive under the wreckage of her home three days after an earthquake killed at least 73 people in eastern Indonesia.
Paulina Pobi was buried under the collapsed bamboo walls of her house at Nitunglea, in Sikka regency on the island of Flores, from Saturday morning until Tuesday.
Ms Pobi is paralysed and could neither move nor call out, which is why it took her family until the fourth day to find her, according to a local official named Rudolfus Riba.
“She’s in good health, there were no injuries at all. She was just a bit weak because she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for days,” Mr Riba told the AFP.
“It feels unreal, almost like a miracle.”
She was taken to the nearest health centre for treatment, the Sikka regency police officer Bambang Supeno told local media.
The magnitude-7.7 earthquake struck off Flores on Saturday morning, injuring over 900 people and displacing 60,000. It also triggered landslides, one of which cut off Ms Pobi’s village.
In the days since, Flores has recorded more than 3,000 aftershocks, at least 86 of them strong enough to be felt, according to Indonesia‘s geological agency.
Many people are still too frightened to go back into damaged houses.
The national disaster mitigation agency said that 398 tonnes of aid had reached affected communities, including food, tents and shelters, but distribution has been hampered by the mountainous terrain of Flores and by roads broken up in the quake, which struck at a shallow depth.
The government had now brought in more military aircraft, ships and personnel to reach remote areas, the agency’s spokesperson Berton Panjaitan said.
Shops, grocery stores and petrol stations are starting to reopen on the island, although debris still covers streets and search teams continue digging through rubble.
Regional police chief Rudi Darmoko said the displaced people were traumatised. “These refugees are not only physically injured but they also have mental health issues that we must not ignore, especially for children,” he said.
Indonesia lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a belt of seismic and volcanic activity running from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific, and records frequent earthquakes. A magnitude 9.1-earthquake off Sumatra in 2004 caused a tsunami that killed nearly 220,000 people across the region, including 170,000 in Indonesia.