Move FM Global News

JAKARTA, Indonesia – The search for survivors, and bodies, continued on Wednesday as the death toll from Saturday night’s volcanic eruption, earthquake and tsunami reached 429.

154 people are still officially missing and 1,485 are being treated for injuries.

Another 16,000 people are displaced, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said Tuesday.

Drones, heavy machinery, photographic techniques and sniffer dogs have been deployed to assist the search and rescue operations now sweeping the remote Java west coast.

Anak Krakatau, the volcano which erupted triggering the catostrophe continues to spew ash.

“There are several locations that we previously thought were not affected,” Yusuf Latif, spokesman for the Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said Tuesday.

“But now we are reaching more remote areas, and in fact there are many victims there,” he said.

A particular target of the searchers is a remote area where there are 6 villages that roads have been cut to, which are believed to have been impacted by the peak of the tsunami with waves topping five metres.

BMKG, the meteorological and geophysics agency, was warning people to stay clear of the coastline through to the end of Boxing Day at least. High waves continue to pound the shoreline, and the authorities say people should be at least one kilometre from the sea.

Experts are warning that there may be more in store as Anak Krakatau has failed to stablilise since its eruption, and could erupt once more.

“Since Anak Krakatau has been actively erupting for the past several months additional tsunamis cannot be excluded,” Hermann Fritz, from the Georgia Institute of Technology was quoted by Reuters Thomson as saying on Tuesday.