Bantul – Indonesian authorities have revised down the death toll from the Java earthquake to nearly 5,800, as new aid supplies helped survivors move forward on the long road to recovery.
The United Nations said distribution of food, medicines and water had greatly improved in devastated areas of central Java island, but emphasized the urgent need to provide shelter to some 340,000 left homeless.
In the disaster area, life slowly returned to normal, with morning markets bustling and primary school students sitting for end-of-year exams despite the fact that hundreds of schools were flattened in the May 27 quake.
After sending assessment teams to Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces, the social affairs ministry revised down the quake death toll from 6,234 to 5,782. The number of injured also went down to from 46,000 to 33,000.
But the ministry dramatically raised the number of people displaced in the crisis, saying more than 343,000 had spent a ninth night in the open, many of them under rudimentary tents made of plastic sheeting and bamboo poles.
"Emergency shelter remains one of our priorities," Puji Pujiono, the deputy area humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, told AFP.
Yogyakarta provincial secretary Bambang Priyohadi said 200,000 tents were needed, while the UN appealed on Sunday for an influx of building materials, saying tents were sometimes difficult to set up amid the rubble.
The Indonesian government has earmarked more than 160 million dollars to rebuild more than 200,000 homes destroyed or badly damaged in the zone. The United Nations has estimated that 100 million dollars are needed over the next six months to cope with the disaster.
Food aid is flowing more freely throughout the disaster area, Pujiono said, adding that more clean water was being trucked in to avert widespread sanitation problems, cited by UN agencies as a major short-term concern.
"Sanitation is the highest priority because so many houses have been destroyed and most of the toilets have gone as well," said Astrid van Agthoven, water and sanitation project officer for the UN Children's Fund ( UNICEF).
"There is definitely a risk of water-borne and sanitation-related diseases, especially in densely populated areas," she added.
Pujiono described the health care situation in the zone as "under control", with the tens of thousands of injured receiving appropriate medical attention, but warned of isolated shortfalls in supplies.
Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla was due in Yogyakarta, the main city in the quake zone, later Monday to oversee ongoing relief efforts, his office said.
Provincial authorities in Yogyakarta will set up bank accounts for each family affected by the disaster to help them protect their aid funds, Priyohadi said, noting: "A tent is not a safe place to save that money."
In hard-hit Bantul district, life seemed to be returning to normal, with morning markets filled with fresh produce and sellers hawking their wares. Primary school students sat under tents or outside their damaged classrooms to take their end-of-year exams, with sixth-grade girls in the village of Serut clad in red and white uniforms clutching their papers in their laps.
"All my friends are here. I feel happy to be here," said nine-year-old Adip, who played games with other children under a big blue tarpaulin suspended by bamboo poles.
Teachers dispensed with regular lessons for the youngest students in an effort to get them used to the idea of returning to class after the quake trauma.
To the north of the quake zone, the Mount Merapi volcano continued to belch heat clouds and send trails of lava down its slopes, with Indonesia still on red alert for an eruption.
Pujiono said local officials had evacuated several hundred villagers – the elderly, women and children – from areas nearest the lava flows, but stressed the rumbling volcano did not pose a "grave concern" to authorities.