Rescuers held out scant hope Sunday for Indonesian quake survivors, handing recovery teams the grim task of retrieving the decaying bodies of some 4000 victims believed buried in rubble.

More international rescue teams arrived with sniffer dogs and specialist equipment on the fourth day after the 7.6-magnitude quake, with large areas still unexplored. But few experts expected to pluck out people alive.

In Padang, a vast team dug at the Ambacang hotel, a focus for rescue efforts, where hopes had been raised for survivors on Saturday after police received a mobile text message supposedly from someone inside.

"I think the chances of finding survivors are very slim," the team leader of Newmont Emergency Rescue Team, Samsubin, said at the scene of the ruined Dutch colonial-era hotel.

"We are taking an aggressive approach today to remove about 140 bodies that we believe are buried near the swimming pool."

Jack hammers and excavators worked over the huge pile of concrete, metal rods and debris which has drawn large crowds despite the clouds of dust and lingering smell of decomposition.

Outside of Padang, the scale of the disaster is only now being discovered. Desperate villagers complained to AFP reporters that they were being neglected while the focus remained on Padang.

Whole villages northwest of Padang were found obliterated after giant landslides buried houses and hundreds of people. One local official put the death toll in one area at about 600.

The dead outside Padang included an entire wedding party of 30 people swept away in an avalanche of mud and rock.

"Today the military will be heading to landslide areas which we have not been able to access earlier because roads are closed and broken," Indonesian military spokesman Sagom Tamboen said.

The mayor of Padang, Fauzi Bahar, said that only 60 percent of affected areas in West Sumatra had been accessed by emergency teams, adding that more equipment was needed given the scale of the task.

"In Padang, we're still in need of heavy machinery and materials to rebuild the houses," he said. "Compared to other places like remote villages, Padang is a city and we're able to get help more quickly."

He said people were "traumatised" in his city, which now faces a colossal rebuilding task.

"Some of the residents had spent 15 years saving money to build their houses and they're gone with a blink of an eye," he said.

Countries from around the world have rushed aid and rescue teams to the scene and international aid groups are ramping up efforts to provide housing, medical services and basics such as food and water.

Teams from Australia, Britain, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the United States have arrived or are travelling to the scene to help overwhelmed and exhausted locals.

Australia sent a warship carrying a full medical team while France dispatched two aircraft carrying humanitarian assistance experts and 25 tonnes of relief supplies.

Both the United Nations and the Red Cross estimate that about 4000 people were trapped when the quake struck in the early evening of Wednesday.

The government death toll, which has not been revised since Thursday, stands at around 800.

The quake struck off Sumatra's west coast northwest of Padang on Wednesday on a major faultline on the volatile "Ring of Fire" that scientists have long warned was a disaster waiting to happen.

AFP

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