Flores quake toll reaches 53, and hospitals are treating people in tents

The count from Saturday's magnitude 7.7 earthquake off Flores keeps climbing. Officials now put the dead at 53, with 36 people seriously hurt and 77 with lighter injuries, and about 5,000 people have left or lost their homes. Al Jazeera reports that more than 1,300 houses across East Nusa Tenggara have now been counted as damaged.

The clearest measure of the damage is where the doctors are standing. In Ruteng and in Maumere, medical staff have put up tents in the open and are treating patients there. They are working outdoors because their own hospital buildings are no longer safe to use. The ground has not settled either. There have been 341 aftershocks since the main quake, and officials say they can carry on for several more days. Aftershocks are the smaller quakes that follow a large one, and the danger they bring is mostly to buildings the first shock already cracked.

Many families are sleeping outside too. In Maumere, people have strung tarpaulins over open ground beside their collapsed houses, and in Sikka regency about 3,300 people fled or were left stranded, many of them sleeping on their own porches. More than 3,500 soldiers and police are now working across the affected districts with three helicopters. Twenty petrol stations have shut, which is a quieter kind of trouble: without fuel, the cars, trucks and generators that a relief effort runs on stop as well.

Why it matters

If you have family in East Nusa Tenggara, the need over the next week is shelter, clean water and fuel more than rescue. Anyone in the area should treat a cracked house as unusable until someone qualified looks at it, because aftershocks of this size are what bring damaged walls down. Watch whether the hospitals in Ruteng and Maumere get back indoors, since that is the plainest test of whether the recovery is actually moving.