Oxfam’s Ian Bray assesses the scale of the earthquake’s damage one week on.

Fifty-six-year-old grandmother Mursidah crawls out of the wreckage of her house to collect water from the taps Oxfam set up a few hours ago. “Thank God for this water,” she says. She had been walking about a mile to collect water from a muddy spring before aid reached here.

A week ago she was packing her bags looking forward to a visit to Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, then her house and her world collapsed. “When it started shaking I just ran out of the house without thinking,” she adds as she shows the bruising on her legs. She was lucky. Her house is now just a bashed about corrugated roof tilted at a hazardous angle. It offers some shade but that is about all.

This is the village of Padang Alai a two and a half hour drive from the city of Padang. It has seen better days. About 90% of the houses are destroyed. The school is a mass of bricks.

Oxfam is trucking water into Mursidah’s village but getting there is not easy. The road is narrow and full of large cracks. The more trucks that pass the more damage is done to the road. Landslides have gouged the surrounding steep hills. The hills remain unstable and there is a fear that the heavy downpours of raining season will cause more landslides. The government has issued storm warnings for the next few days.

Nine villages in this area were cut off for some time before the roads were cleared and two villages are still only accessible by foot. On the day the earthquake struck there were 200 people attending a wedding in one of the villages. The village is now a tomb.

This is the area where the earthquake did its worse. If the houses weren’t shaken to oblivion they were buried under tons of earth, boulders and trees as hills gave way.

Some of the damage is not immediately obvious. Late at night in a torrential downpour retired school mistresses Elok and Peteta invited us into the house they share. There is no electricity and only minimal light from flickering paraffin lamps.

While they heaped hospitality on to us they described being out in the fields when the earthquake spewed up earth, water and smoke from the ground. The sound was deafening. They talk at the same time as if collectively exorcising the terror. Their house survived intact but their well, which used to provide sweet drinking water, now has a thick and drying dirty crust of mud on the surface. Wells a little further away are now just sand pits. The earthquake must have churned up the underground water as well as everything above ground.

The scale of the earthquake’s damage is slowly being revealed as the more remote areas are reached. So far some 125,000 houses are destroyed, leaving around 500,000 people homeless, 55 health facilities are piles of rubble, nine bridges are down and 162 roads are in urgent need of repair.

In a display of humanitarian muscle the United States has sent in a ship equipped with helicopters to help with the logistical struggle to shift the huge amounts of aid required. The aid effort is gathering pace and much more visible as aid teams fan out to the villages of a wide-spread ground zero.

Aid was being delivered in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The first few days of a disaster are crucial. In that time it is nearly impossible to get supplies in. Tele-communications are down, airports closed, roadways blocked. The smart money is spent on having aid there ready to go before the humanitarian cavalry has time to arrive. But deciding where to place emergency aid stocks is tricky.

Indonesia is more than three thousand miles long from Aceh, the site of the 2004 tsunami devastation in the west to the border with Papua New Guinea in the east. An old popular song, Dari Sabang Sampai Merauke, celebrates the length of what the song calls homeland Indonesia . But this stretch of islands is also three thousand miles of potential seismic disasters. Where you place your needle of emergency stocks in this lengthy haystack is a question aid strategists grapple with.

Oxfam looked at possible earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, potential number of victims, what they would need in the first days and which local organisation could deliver the aid at a moments notice. One of the places it decided to place its immediate emergency stocks was Padang. Two local organisations sprang into action in the immediate aftermath. Some of their help can been seen as you travel from Padang on the road to the epicentre. Mile after mile you see the distinctive blue Oxfam tarpaulins stretched outside destroyed houses offering some shelter from the elements.

Meanwhile in its operational centre Oxfam has a team of more than 30 aid experts working hard to supply clean water and other essentials to those affected. Many of them are local veterans of something like 35 disasters that have hit Indonesia in recent years. It plans to help 150,000 people caught up in this disaster. The race is on. It needs you help.

Find out more: East Asia Disasters Appeal

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