5. Death toll rises as Indonesia cleans up after weekend tsunami

Rescuers combing wreckage after a tsunami struck Indonesia on Saturday continued to find more victims on Monday, with at least 373 people now known to have been killed and more than 1400 injured after a volcanic eruption was believed to have triggered surging tides.

At least 128 people are reported missing, while hundreds of homes, hotels, shops and other buildings have been destroyed.

Although they were still investigating, Indonesian officials and volcanologists believed that the tsunami was likely to have been caused by an undersea landslide following an eruption of Anak Krakatau, the “child of Krakatau” volcano.

Anak Krakatau, which sits in the Sunda Strait separating Indonesia’s two most populous islands of Java and Sumatra, emerged from the caldera of Krakatau after it erupted in cataclysmic fashion in 1883. It has been erupting regularly in the past few months.

Extending for 5000 km along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, Indonesia is the world’s most volcanically active nation and has been hit hard by seismic activity this year, with several thousand people killed by earthquakes on the island of Lombok in July and an earthquake and tsunami striking Palu on the island of Sulawesi in September.

The area worst hit by Saturday’s tsunami was Banten province in western Java, just 100 km west of Jakarta, where residents of the capital city often go for weekend breaks by the sea.

Several hotels there were badly damaged and terrifying video footage showed the waves hitting one resort during a concert by Seventeen, a local rock band that lost several members in the disaster.

Officials said that the scale of the human impact was exacerbated by a lack of warnings, despite efforts to build public alert systems after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed 170,000 people in Indonesia alone.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, head of information at Indonesia’s BNPB national disaster mitigation agency, said that a buoy system designed to warn of incoming tsunamis had not been operational since 2012 because of budget limitations, vandalism and other damage.

“It needs to be rebuilt in order to strengthen Indonesia’s tsunami early warning system,” he said.

President Joko Widodo, who faces a re-election battle against longtime rival Prabowo Subianto in April, visited the affected areas on Monday morning to inspect the damage.