Hospital horror as corpses pile up

The scent of freshly cut timber mixed with the stench of powerful disinfectants and the smell of rotting corpses today as empty coffins were piled up behind a hospital morgue in Bali.

Inside, a small army of volunteers – tattooed backpackers in flip-flops, Balinese college students and others – were trying to sort out the remains of nearly 200 people killed in Saturday’s massive car bombing.

With local hospitals overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, many local and foreign residents turned out to help.

“You have to do something,” said Agung Suryanata, a 29-year-old Balinese management student who showed up at Bali’s main Sanglah Hospital with more than a dozen classmates.

They all said they were prepared to take a turn on the night shift, carrying out bodies.

For the time being, though, he was doing a lot of standing around.

“We are just confused about what to do,” he said, looking at the swirl of humanity. “Nobody says do this or do that.”

It was not really clear just how it was working at Sanglah, but it was working, a do-it-yourself morgue and information clearinghouse just where it was needed most.

The volunteers did everything from gathering descriptions of missing people to picking up used rubber gloves to carrying out bodies, which were wrapped in heavy yellow plastic and iced to slow their decomposition.

Officials said that most, if not all, the seriously injured had been flown elsewhere, many to Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

By today, most of the remaining victims in Bali were either dead – though only a few dozen of the more than 180 believed killed had been positively identified - or were slightly injured.

Still, there was plenty to do.

“We clean rooms of rubbish ... We serve coffee. We carry body bags to the refrigerated container. We do anything that they tell us to,” said Mark Parthezius, 24, who was volunteering with his parents.

The Australian family have lived in Bali for 10 years.

“I am very tired,” said his mother, Nanette. “I spent the whole day matching photographs to their badly burned-out faces. It was very draining mentally.”

For some volunteers, working at the hospital was a personal burden.

Off to the side of the car park, taking a break from the horror of the morgue, an Australian man stared blankly back at the building.

He was there for a co-worker, he said, a man who had been around the destroyed Sari Club on the night of the explosion.

But since only a small group of colleagues knew he was missing, and were unsure of his fate, he did not want to give his, or his co-worker’s name.

“He is not accounted for,” the man said, still staring directly at the morgue. “So we have to try to find him.”

Asked about the scene inside, where dozens of corpses were earlier rotting with little protection from the heat, he answered simply: “It’s not great.”

By today, though, a refrigerated truck had been brought in, and a mobile generator to keep it cold, and tons of ice were piled shoulder-high just outside the morgue’s door.

“The hospital is clearly overwhelmed,” said John Wilkinson, a volunteer at the Australian consulate helping relatives of the missing. “They are not used to seeing the numbers of dead and injured ... They were flooded in the wee hours of the night with dead people.”

A few hundred yards away, other volunteers were overseeing growing, hand-printed lists – the dead, the injured, the missing, the evacuated.

Faxes and photocopied signs had been stapled up, excruciating demands for help: There is Dan Miller who “was last seen at the Sari Club on Saturday night,” his poster says, and Kristen Curnow, whose photograph shows a smiling young woman with shoulder-length hair.

“Have you seen this boy missing from Sari Club?” another asks. “His name is Danny Lewis. Please phone his family.”

One volunteer was quizzing people on whether they could help identify particular corpses.

“Did she have a belly button ring?” she asked a man who was able to offer vague information on a woman he had seen.

“Because we have a woman in the morgue with a belly-button ring.”

With such grotesque statements suddenly normal, the bombing destroyed the fantasy of Bali, which despite decades of development – it has flashy malls now and sprawling hotels – still remains, to many, the ideal of the island paradise.

Thousands of tourists have already fled the island, and more people are preparing to leave.

“I might have to leave Bali and go back to Jakarta,” said Edyson Manurung, a hospital volunteer and professional drummer who has spent six years in Bali. “I love it here, but there is no job as a musician. The cafes and bars are empty. I can’t stay and it breaks my heart.