Indonesian tsunami death toll hits 429 with 128 missing

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Indonesian tsunami death toll hits 429 with 128 missing and thousands homeless while torrential rain hampers rescue efforts

Search and rescue efforts will continue until Sunday, police said, but officials admitted there was little chance of finding anyone else alive.

Efforts will now turn to providing medical aid for the 1,400 injured by the tidal wave triggered by an eruption at the ‘Child of Krakatoa’ volcano on Saturday, and finding shelter for the 16,000 whose homes were destroyed.

But torrential rain was hampering those efforts on Christmas Day, making searches difficult and hindering ambulances brought in to take dead bodies out of the disaster zone.

Pastor Markus Taekz said Tuesday his Rahmat Pentecostal Church in the hard-hit area of Carita did not celebrate with joyous songs this year.

The waves followed an eruption and apparent landslide on Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa,” a volcanic island that formed in the early part of the 20th century near the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who faces what promises to be a tough re-election campaign next year, vowed to have all tsunami-detection equipment replaced or repaired.

Nugroho acknowledged on Twitter that the country’s network of detection buoys had been out of order since 2012 because of vandalism and budget shortfalls.

But the head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, Dwikorita Karnawati, said the tsunami was likely caused by Krakatau’s volcanic activity and so could not have been picked up by the agency’s sensors, which monitor conventional earthquakes responsible for more than 90 percent of Indonesia’s tsunamis.

Karnawati said the tsunami was probably caused by the collapse of a big section of the volcano’s slope.

Anak Krakatau been erupting since June and did so again 24 minutes before the tsunami, the geophysics agency said. Other scientists have said an underwater landslide may also have contributed to the disaster.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands and home to 260 million people, lies along the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

The massive eruption of Krakatoa killed more than 30,000 people and hurled so much ash that it turned day to night in the area and reduced global temperatures.

Thousands were believed killed by a quake and tsunami that hit Sulawesi island in September, and an earlier quake on the island of Lombok killed 505 people in August