After M7.7 Quake, Flores Islanders Wake to 1,000 Aftershocks and Call It 'Business as Usual'

MAUMERE, Indonesia — The earth moved under Flores Island early Saturday morning, and the people of Flores responded the way the people of Flores have always responded: by moving.

A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Flores, collapsing buildings in the coastal city of Maumere and sending residents into the streets with the particular urgency of people who have done this before. A tsunami warning was issued, held for about three hours, and then lifted — a polite heads-up, which the island took, in the words of one resident, “as a suggestion.”

The toll is rising, and it is being counted with the care it deserves. Authorities confirmed at least 51 dead by Sunday, and the number has since climbed to at least 54, with search-and-rescue teams still working through collapsed structures in Maumere, the capital of Sikka regency. The National Search and Rescue Agency’s chief in Maumere, Fathur Rahman, said the teams were working through the debris “with everything we have,” which is, for a man whose job is to find people under rubble, about as much reassurance as the job allows.

The aftershocks, for their part, are continuing on what geologists are now describing as a schedule. CBS News reported the island has logged nearly 1,000 aftershocks in the days since the quake struck, including one of magnitude 6.1 — which is, in the local idiom, the island finishing its sentences. “You don’t get one shake and then quiet,” said a BASARNAS volunteer clearing rubble in Maumere. “You get the shake, and then the shake keeps going. That’s just how it talks here.”

The damage has cut the island off from itself. Landslides have buried roads and isolated villages across six regencies, and at least one — Nagekeo — had not yet been reached as of Sunday, its communications disrupted. Indonesian authorities have sent helicopters to deliver supplies and evacuate the injured, a commitment to the last regency that, as one official put it, “is what the republic is for.”

What struck observers, in the days since, was less the scale of the earthquake than the quality of the response — the neighbors with the rope, the volunteers with the shovels, the island that had already been through a great deal and was, once again, simply getting on with it. “The ground shook, we moved,” said one resident of Maumere, surveying a street that had been a street on Friday and was, on Saturday, a suggestion of a street. “That’s the arrangement.”

At press time, Indonesian authorities had begun describing the aftershocks as “normal for this time of year,” and a geologist with the national agency confirmed that the island “tends to work in batches.” The helicopters, for their part, were back in the air.