The death toll from Saturday’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake off Flores island rose through Sunday as rescue teams cleared landslides and reached villages that had been cut off since the shaking stopped. Authorities put the figure at 51, with Bloomberg reporting 53 later in the day. Around 5,000 people have been displaced.

Thirty-six people were seriously injured and 77 sustained minor injuries, Deputy Health Minister Benjamin Paulus Octavianus said. More than 1,300 homes were damaged. Indonesia’s meteorological agency recorded at least 235 aftershocks.

What changed on day two

The gap we flagged on Saturday has partly closed. Rescuers had been unable to reach Nagekeo, the regency nearest the epicentre, where landslides had blocked the roads and communications were down. Teams have now pushed into previously isolated areas across six regencies on Flores, and the fatalities are concentrated in three of them.

Landslides had blocked sections of the Trans-Flores Highway, the roughly 700-kilometre road that links communities along the mountainous island. Reopening it is what allows everything else — casualty counts, aid, heavy equipment — to move.

Local search-and-rescue officials said on Sunday they had received no further reports of people trapped or missing under rubble. That is a meaningful marker: it suggests the count is approaching completeness rather than still climbing steeply, though it is not the same as certainty in areas only just reached.

The immediate problems

Authorities named three: restoring electricity, restoring communications, and getting aid to remote villages still isolated by landslides. Relief workers have been distributing rice, ready-to-eat meals, drinking water, blankets and medicine, and emergency shelters are being set up.

Images from Ruteng in Manggarai regency showed temporary medical tents pitched beside a damaged hospital and a university building in ruins. Treating patients outdoors is standard practice after a large quake — not because the hospital is destroyed, but because nobody can safely occupy a damaged building while aftershocks continue.

Why the figures differ

Readers comparing coverage will see 47, 51 and 53 in different places on the same day. This is normal and not evidence of anyone concealing anything: agencies publish at different moments, the national disaster agency and provincial authorities count separately, and bodies recovered in the afternoon appear in one wire service’s copy before another’s.

The useful habit is to note the source and the time rather than treating the highest or lowest number as the true one. We are citing Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency at 51, with Bloomberg’s later 53 noted alongside it.

What comes next

With no further reports of people trapped, the operation shifts from rescue to shelter and reconstruction. Five thousand displaced people in a region entering a hot, wet season with 1,300 damaged homes is the problem that outlasts the news cycle — and the aftershocks are not finished.

Sources

Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) and National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS); the US Geological Survey; reporting by NPR, the Associated Press, AFP, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg.