Yogyakarta, Indonesia – Significant amounts of aid began arriving Monday in Bantul, the town south of Yogyakarta that was hit the hardest by Saturday’s earthquake, but a nearby volcano substantially increased its threatening activity.
For the third night in a row, residents in Bantul and in Klaten, another badly ravaged town, slept outside their houses, grouped around campfires and using debris for cover from the sporadic rain.
Mount Merapi, a towering 9,800-foot-high volcano north of Yogyakarta, has been close to an eruption for nearly a month, but activity weakened in recent weeks.
But Monday, large clouds of gas were vented from the mountain’s crater, drifting more than 2 miles down its western slope toward the village of Magelang.
Indonesia’s Social Affairs Ministry raised the quake’s death toll to 5,137, saying about 800 bodies that were buried in mass graves immediately after the quake had just been counted.
Thousands of people, including children and the elderly, lined main roads in the area of the 6.3-magnitude quake, holding out whatever containers they could find to hold donations to buy rice, oil and candles.
“Please give me something, I’m hungry,” 7-year-old Sari told passing drivers, standing beside a group of children carrying banners that read “We have not gotten any aid” and “Help us.”
A plane chartered by the U.N. children’s agency touched down near the disaster area, and the United States, which pledged $2.5 million, said 100 military doctors and nurses were en route with surgical, dental and other equipment, but rough roads in mountainous central Java and new cracks in the runway at the region’s main airport hampered delivery efforts.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.