Drive to aid Indonesia

The Indonesian military sent teams to the province to rescue survivors, residents said, along with about 600 military cadets here clearing debris and starting reconstruction.

The government's attention appears to be focused on overwhelmed hospitals where doctors have been triaging patients crammed into hallways and courtyards. Hundreds of victims are lying on newspapers, plastic tarpaulins, and even banana and palm leaves. Nurses were forced to set up intravenous drips using trees in car parks as props.

Budi Mulyono, a spokesman for the Sardjito Hospital, says they needed more of everything, including doctors, medical supplies, and tents.

At Yogyakarta's Muhammadiyah Hospital, which is filled to seven times its normal capacity, paramedic Gunawan says, "Our doctors and nurses were included among the victims. So you can imagine our situation. This is the best I can do at the moment."

Many had feared devastation and death on the scale that followed the tsunami in in 2004. The quake death toll by Monday night reached 5,140, according to Biwara Yuswantana, a government spokesperson, although it was expected to keep climbing.

The two disasters differed in another way as well, says Gunawan, who worked as a medic in Aceh for five months.

"The difference is the [nature of the injuries suffered by] victims and the lack of dead bodies, says Gunawan. 'In this earthquake, there were bodies, but there were also true emergency patients."

In the coming days, aid workers cite several local conditions that will help their relief effort. Yogyakarta airport is functioning. And unlike Aceh, most roads were undamaged. In fact, much of the area's infrastructure, including communications towers, sewage facilities, and government offices were left largely intact.

By nightfall Monday, thick rains fell on thousands of the displaced, sheltering in tent settlements, parking lots, and rice fields.

"My house was flattened, everything was flattened," says Wati, a grandmother, who, like many Indonesians, only uses one name. She crouched with her two grandchildren in a deserted shop opposite the main buildings of an Islamic university in Yogyakarta that had been tipped sideways by the quake.

Residents of the rice-growing towns of Bantul and Klaten, the worst hit areas, had been watching the grumbling volcano Mt. Merapi, that has been spewing clouds of ash and gas in recent weeks.

Activity in the volcano has tripled since Saturday's earthquake, with hot clouds spewed out an average of 150 times a day, compared with 50 times before, said Subandriyo, chief of the Merapi volcanology and monitoring office.

"The earthquake has caused instability in the lava dome," Subandriyo told the Associated Press. "There is still a chance that a big eruption might occur."

Chew Soon Hoe, an associate professor of engineering geology at the National University of Singapore, says Merapi's renewed activity and the earthquake are related. Both are in the same subduction zone - the area where one tectonic plate slides under another plate - along a boundary between the Euro-Asia plate and the India-Australia plate, he says.

"This ocean plate ... is the cause of the recent earthquake and volcanic activity in Indonesia," Mr. Chew says. "Because it is very near, the energy released by the quake will accelerate or perturb the activity of the volcano."

David Booth, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey, disagrees, saying the quake would not necessarily cause the volcano to erupt. He says the plates that shifted to cause the earthquake did not necessarily open cracks in the surface that would be needed to cause a volcanic eruption.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago sits atop the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines around the Pacific basin. Indonesia has some 129 active volcanoes.

• Reporting from the wire services was used in this story.

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