Rescuers sifting through the debris of a garbage landslide in Indonesia say that any of the more than 100 missing who have not suffocated or been crushed to death have probably died of heat exposure.
As the search went into its third day, officials said the intense heat caused by decomposing refuse meant those trapped in their homes under tonnes of waste, soil and debris stood very little chance of survival.
"There cannot be any more survivors," said search and rescue official Budi Hadiwiguno. Military officials put the number of those feared dead at 160.
"We are not dealing with just soil and mud. The layer of waste is hot on the inside and most of the victims found yesterday had their skin peeled. It is as if they had been in an oven," he added.
The disaster struck in the early hours of Monday as people slept and buried up to 70 homes built in the shadow of a dumpsite at Cimahi, near the city of Bandung, around 200 kilometres southeast of Jakarta.
A local military official, Purwanto, said that 50 bodies had so far been recovered and 95 residents were still listed as missing. In addition a further 15 scavengers had been reported missing.
Ahmad Saefudin, deputy head of the search and rescue task force, said pockets of explosive methane gas were further complicating efforts, creating both unstable ground for the excavators and a potential hazard for rescuers.
Hadiwiguno said the fine compost-like composition of the soil was also hindering the work. "The soil is hard to excavate because it has plenty of plastic material and other non-degradable material in it." The threat of intermittent rain triggering further landslides was of further concern, officials said.
Saefudin refused to be drawn on when the rescue would be called off. "I do not want to talk about a timeframe. Everything will depend on various factors, including the weather, the psychological state of the workers and the limitation of working in an environment with harmful gas."
Hadiwiguno said that rescuers had still to get to many of the buried homes. "We have located the approximate locations of the clusters of houses and we will begin by digging around them and then we will begin the careful excavation." Saefudin added: "We will try to reach ground level around the houses and only after that will we start to look for victims." No survivors have been pulled from the debris since Monday, when a boy was rescued alive from the fringes of the disaster area, some 12 hours after the catastrophe struck.
Steam was rising from the ground covered by the landslide, which Hadiwiguno said had deposited a layer of soil and waste on average seven metres deep. The air was thick with the stench of waste and decay.
"If they had been some 1.5 metres under the waste, they could still be found alive on the second day, but on the third the possibility is almost non-existent," Hadiwiguno said.
"Most of the victims have been found in groups inside their houses. They were mostly caught by surprise by the swift slide of the garbage," which he said moved at an estimated 250 kilometres an hour and left a trail of devastation for up to 900 metres.
But still teams continued to pick through the rubble, with army and police teams painstakingly sifting by hand through mountains of garbage and debris as diggers cleared away tonnes of earth and waste.
Whole houses lay buried or part-covered, with broken brick, crushed plasterboard and wooden beams like matchsticks spread over a wide area. Hadiwiguno said rescue teams would likely continue the search until Monday when they would reassess the situation.