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International rescue teams are heading to Indonesia in a last-ditch effort to free trapped earthquake survivors. Experts from Britain, Australia and South Korea were en route to Sumatra, hit by a 7.6-magnitude quake two days ago. Others pledged emergency cash. More than 1,000 people are already known to have died, the UN says, with thousands thought to remain trapped. Rescue efforts are focused on the city of Padang but aid workers and reporters said that in rural areas thousands more buildings had been destroyed and whole villages flattened. Marco Werman gets an update from the BBC’s Rachel Harvey in Padang.

• BBC coverage
• In pictures: Indonesia rescue effort

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  President Obama called the president of Indonesia today — to offer his condolences.  The Indonesian island of Sumatra was rocked by an earthquake on Wednesday.  The city of Padang was hit hard.  The United Nations says more than a thousand people were killed.  Rescuers — including some international teams — are still combing through the remains of collapsed buildings in Padang.  It’s feared that thousands of people may still be buried in the rubble.  The BBC’s Rachel Harvey is in Padang.  She walked around the city earlier today.

RACHEL HARVEY: I started out just by a row of shops that used to be three stories high, but they’re now only two stories high.  The whole of that first storey is just collapsed.  And there were some military officers and some rescue officials working   hard in there because they had heard that there were at least seven bodies.  And they were trying to extract those bodies.  Then I moved on to the hospitals, and that’s where a lot of the bodies are being collected. There’s an open air, makeshift morgue that’s been set up with rows and rows of yellow body bags.  The hospital itself has actually been quite badly affected by the earthquake, but there’s one part of it that’s still operational, another that’s been completely devastated and can’t be used at all.  So they’re struggling to cope with the number of causalities.

WERMAN: Padang is a modern city, with shopping malls.  Are there tall buildings?  What is, kind of, the building stock there?  Give us, kind of the before and after shot.

HARVEY: It’s not skyscrapers.  We’re not talking a kind of Chicago skyline.  It’s a mixture of traditional Padang structures, which have these sort of pointed ends to them on the roofs.  Very beautiful buildings.  And some more modern structures, maybe 6, 7, stories high, then a couple of old Dutch colonial buildings.  So it’s a mixture.  And it is quite an important port city, this Padang.  It has always known it’s on a very vulnerable fault line.  And scientists have been warning this is an area that was likely at some stage to be badly affected by an earthquake.  Of course the problem is it’s so hard to predict precisely when, and where, and how powerful such any earthquake’s going to be.

WERMAN: Sure.  The reports now are that people are still buried in the rubble of some of these collapsed buildings.  Do you have a sense of how progress is going on rescuing those people?

HARVEY: Yes, just this evening the Indonesian government has revised upwards, again, its view of how many people   may be buried under the rubble.  They’re now saying it could be as many as 3,000.  Once they’re saying that, if anything, the efforts to try and rescue any survivors that may still be alive under that debris are increasing.  Some international teams have arrived.  I saw a Swiss team here with sniffer dogs working into the night.  There is a kind of determination to make sure if there is anybody alive, they are absolutely going to be reached if at all possible.  And of course, in amongst that, there are stories of those who have already been freed. When I was in the hospital earlier, I spoke to a 13 year old, young girl, very, very brave.  She’s called [PH] “Nisrena.”  And she was telling me that she’d had a very lucky escape.

NISRENA: I tried to run and save myself, but the building got on my body.

HARVEY: So you were trapped underneath?

NISRENA: Yes.

HARVEY: How did you get out?

NISRENA: My father helped me.  After four hours.

HARVEY: For four hours, you were trapped underneath?

NISRENA: Yes.

HARVEY: You must have been really scared when you were trapped.

NISRENA: Yes, of course.  I cannot think about it.  My foot was broken and I got amputation.  It is…I can’t describe….

WERMAN: A very brave and lucky girl there, named Nisrena in Padang.  The BBC’s Rachel Harvey.  You’ve been speaking with aid workers and doctors, what are their big concerns?

HARVEY: Well, it’s interesting.  I was talking to one orthopedic surgeon who’s running the medical side of the relief effort here.  And I asked him what the priorities would be, and what outsiders may be able to do to help.  I was expecting him to say, “Look, we’re short of equipment, or maybe we need more medicine.”  What he actually said, was, “We’re really short of clean water, struggling to keep everything clean and sanitized and hygienic.”  And that is of course true in any disaster zone.  I think here also, we’re beginning to see a few other shortages, there are big queues at gas stations, partly perhaps people getting a bit of “panic buying” going.  But there are concerns that perhaps more needs to be brought in.  Having said that, though, the airport’s open, the roads are open.  Apart from, still, some rural roads that we believe may be blocked, there were some localized landslides in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That blocked some roads. So, getting out to those rural roads has been difficult.  Once we have a clearer picture of what’s   going on there, I think we might be able to have a clearer assessment of the overall disaster zone.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Rachel Harvey in Padang, Indonesia.  Thank you very much, Rachel.

HARVEY: Thank you.

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