Hospital struggles to cope with victims of volcano (News Feature)

By Ahmad Pathoni Nov 9, 2010, 5:19 GMT

Yogyakarta, Indonesia - In the main hospital in Indonesia's city of Yogyakarta, patients with burns over most of their bodies, hooked to ventilators and wrapped in bandages, were being treated in an unsealed intermediate-care room.

Jets of searing gas, ash and pumice blanketed villages on the slopes of Central Java's Mount Merapi, which started to erupt last month.

Agus Barmawi, chief of a medical team attending to the injured, acknowledged that the treatment was 'substandard.' The hospital's burn unit, the only one in the city, can only treat 10 patients at the same time.

'Our priority is to keep them alive,' he said, noting that some of the patients had only a 40-per-cent chance of survival.

'Those who aren't treated in the burns unit have higher risk of morbidity, or even mortality.'

Barmawi, a general surgeon, said 75 per cent of patients admitted to the hospital with burn injuries after the volcano erupted for the first time in four years on October 26 had died.

In contrast, only one out of 29 patients admitted after the bigger eruption on Friday had succumbed to their injuries, he said.

'Some of them may require surgery, which takes time, costs a lot of money but the results of which may not be good,' he said.

The doctor said the hospital had only two plastic surgeons but specialists from other cities were helping.

The official death toll from the eruptions stood at 141, but rescue workers said they believed several victims were still buried under thick ash that covered their villages.

Relatives and friends of people missing after the eruptions had gathered outside the hospital's forensic medical unit, trying to determine if the charred bodies being kept in the hospital were of their loved ones.

Nurfitriyani, who at 17 is three months pregnant, said she was looking for her husband, 19-year-old Taufik Nugroho.

'He's been missing for three days and I've almost lost hope of finding him alive,' she said.

Rescue workers said at least five bodies were found in her village of Plumbon, in Sleman district.

Yadi Bebe, a rescue worker with the local social affairs department, said four of his colleagues were killed in Friday's eruption, and another perished on October 26.

'They were helping evacuate villagers in Glagaharjo village when hot clouds rained down on the area,' he said. 'They were heroes.'

The bodies of two of them had not yet been identified, he said.

'There were several bodies in the forensic room but I couldn't tell which were theirs,' he said.

Merapi has continued to erupt since Friday, and some officials said many of the estimated 250,000 displaced people might have to stay in emergency shelters for more than a month.

Hot gas and ash burned homes, animals and vegetation, injuring more than 400 people and destroying as many as 26 hamlets.

The 2,968-metre peak's deadliest eruption on record occurred in 1930 when 1,370 people were killed. At least 66 people died in a 1994 eruption, and two people were killed in 2006.

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