Storms hit aid effort for quake survivors

Hundreds of miles away, a volcano on the island of Java that killed 35 people this week erupted five more times, but no more casualties were reported.

Four days after the tsunami crashed into the Mentawai islands off Sumatra the death toll has risen above 400 and details of survivors' misery and new accounts of the terrifying moments when the wave struck were still trickling out from the area.

A group of surfers told of huddling, screaming and praying as they watched a roaring wall of water cross a lagoon and slam into their three-storey thatch-roofed resort. The power of the wave shook the building so hard they feared it would collapse. All 27 people at the resort survived – five of them by clinging to trees.

"It was noise and chaos. You can hear the water coming, coming, coming," Chilean surfer Sebastian Carvallo said. "And then before the second wave hit the building, everyone was, like, screaming and when the wave hit the building you could only hear people praying."

He said at least two of the waves were at least 16 feet high. Officials have said there was only one wave 10 feet high, but several witnesses have described one or several taller ones.

Dozens of injured survivors of the tsunami were at a hard-pressed hospital, including a newly orphaned two-month-old boy found in a storm drain.

The child, with cuts on his face, blinked sleepily in a humidified crib. Hospital workers named him Imanual Tegar. Tegar means "tough" in Indonesian.

"We need doctors, specialists," nurse Anputra said at the tiny hospital in Pagai Utara – one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain hit by Monday's tsunami.

Relief workers in Hercules planes air-dropped food – mostly boxes of instant noodles – onto the hardest-hit areas in the Mentawais.

Heavy storms made the visibility unsafe for helicopters and the seas too dangerous for small boats to deliver emergency supplies. A shortage of small boats was also holding up aid.

And rescue workers said they cannot deliver aid to the farther-flung coastal villages that are accessible only by foot or by sea because roads on the islands are too old or damaged for large trucks.

Most of the islands' craft were washed away by the wave.

Authorities on the Mentawais have taken 20 traditional wooden boats that survived the wave to ferry supplies to cut off villages.

But heavy rains yesterday that churned up the sea made air drops the only option. The weather is also disrupting communications, making it hard to contact the islands by mobile phone or even satellite phone.

The toll from the tsunami and the earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean that spawned it rose to 408 as officials found more bodies, and 303 people were still missing and feared swept out to sea.

Along with the 35 people killed when Mount Merapi erupted on Tuesday, the number of dead from the two disasters, which struck within 24 hours of each other, has now reached 443.