Scores of buildings including hotels, schools and mosques collapsed in the quake [Reuters]

Rescue workers in the earthquake-devastated Indonesian city of Padang have been stepping up the hunt for survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings, although hopes of finding many of the hundreds missing still alive are beginning to fade.

As of Friday afternoon, almost 48 hours after the quake hit the Sumatran city, only a handful of survivors have been pulled from the wreckage.

The United Nations has said it believes more than 1,000 people have been killed, although the latest Indonesian government death toll stands at 777, with hundreds more injured.

With foreign aid teams and more heavy lifting gear arriving on the scene, Marlis Raham, the deputy governor of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, said he was still hopeful more survivors would be found.

"I don't think it's too late, there's still hope that some of the people trapped can be saved," he said.

Raham said more than 15,000 buildings in Padang had collapsed in the powerful magnitude 7.6 quake.

The devastation has already raised questions over lax building standards and whether buildings such as schools were strong enough to cope with a known earthquake zone.

'A lot of corpses'

One Padang school reduced to a pile of twisted iron and rubble had been hosting dozens of students attending after-school lessons when the quake struck.

Swiss emergency workers are among several foreign teams on the scene [AFP]

"We have pulled out 38 children since the quake. Some of them, on the first day, were still alive, but the last few have all been dead," rescue team leader Suria told Reuters news agency.

"There are still a lot of corpses in there. You can smell it. They are towards the back where we can't reach. The problem is a lot of buildings around here weren't very well built."

Other buildings brought down by the quake include scores of businesses, hotels, shopping malls and mosques.

As rescue teams from Switzerland, Australia, Japan and the US arrived in Padang, the Indonesian government has appealed for further international aid, including medics and medical supplies to treat the hundreds of wounded.

"We need help from foreign countries for evacuation efforts. We need them to provide skilled rescuers with equipment," Siti Fadilah Supari, the Indonesian health minister, told reporters in Jakarta.

"Our main problem is that there are a lot of victims still trapped in the rubble. We are struggling to pull them out."

Fuel rationed

Telephone links and other communications with many districts around Padang remained difficult on Friday and officials have said the number of dead was likely rise yet further as the full scale of the disaster emerged.

Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, flew to Padang himself on Friday to oversee the relief effort.

He told emergency services to be prepared for the worst, saying it was "better to overestimate than to underestimate".

Yudhoyono pledged $10 million in emergency relief funds would be put to work fast to help recovery efforts.

"No more red tape," he said. "This is an emergency, the race is important."

Indonesia has appealed for medicines and doctors to help the relief effort [Reuters]

The powerful undersea earthquake struck on Wednesday evening, about 50km from Padang and caused buildings to sway in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, 940km away, and the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur.

Dozens of aftershocks followed, as did a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck on Thursday morning, about 225km southeast of Padang, causing widespread panic and badly damaging houses but causing no casualties in Jambi, another Sumatran town.

Padang, the capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the so-called Ring of Fire.

A massive magnitude 9.2 quake on the same fault in 2004 triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India among other countries.

Padang itself was badly hit by an 8.4 magnitude quake in September 2007, when dozens of people died and several large buildings collapsed.

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