Officials in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, failed to issue a tsunami warning despite receiving data about yesterday's earthquake 20 minutes before the first wave struck the island of Java.
One official told the Guardian they were too busy monitoring the aftershocks of the 7.7-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami to raise the alarm. The government's science and technology minister, Kusmayanto Kadiman, confirmed today that Indonesia had received bulletins from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii and Japan's meteorological agency after the quake, but "we did not announce them".
"If it [the tsunami] did not occur, what would have happened?" he said in Jakarta.
The death toll rose to 341 today as rescuers combed the devastated coastal communities. At least 200 people are missing. Bodies covered in sheets were piled up at makeshift morgues or lay under the blazing sun on a beach popular with tourists. "I don't mind losing any of my property, but please God, return my son," a villager, Basril, told AP as he and his wife searched through rubble at the once idyllic Pangandaran resort.
Aerial television footage showed that virtually all wooden buildings, which make up the majority of the beachfront homes and hotels on Java, were swept away, along with about half the brick structures. Buildings up to half a mile inland were damaged. Some 30,000 people are thought to have fled their homes.
At least 181 died in Pangandaran, about 170 miles south-east of Jakarta. A total of 89 were reported killed in Cilacap, 25 miles to the east, more than 40 in Tasikmalaya district and the rest in other beachfront villages. Three Dutch, a Swede and a Pakistani were among the dead. The British ambassador to Indonesia, Charles Humfrey, said there were no reports of any Britons being hurt.
Speaking from Pangandaran, Major Dedi Santoso of the Indonesian military told the Guardian: "I think we're going to be busy recovering corpses for many hours to come. There are a lot of bodies buried under the rubble. It's as if they had no warning about what was coming."
Survivors' tales appeared to confirm that there was no warning. "The police and officials did not give us any warning whatsoever about the tsunami," Supratu, a fisherman, told AP. "Suddenly this big wall of water appeared and I started screaming and running."
A Belgian tourist, Ian, told Reuters that his warning was a waitress running past him screaming. "I saw this big cloud of dark sea water coming up to me," he said. "So I grabbed the bag and started running ... and then the water grabbed me and pulled me under and I was thinking 'this is the end, I'm going down'." He survived by grabbing on to a cooler and rode the wave into a nearby hotel.
Many people said they were saved by memories of the television footage of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed 230,000 people.
"As soon as I felt the earthquake I knew it would be better to start running to higher ground away from the beach," Miskam told a local radio station. "I didn't know if there was going to be a tsunami but I didn't want to take any chances."
The tsunami centre in Hawaii issued a warning 20 minutes after the main earthquake. It was acted upon by people living in Australia's Christmas Island, 140 miles south of the epicentre.
Indonesia's one sensor in the area, near Cilacap, detected the earthquake and sent a report "in real time" to the meteorological and geophysical agency in Jakarta, an official there, Sugun, told the Guardian. "It was detected about 18 minutes after the earthquake but we were so busy monitoring all the aftershocks." When asked if that was why they did not issue a tsunami warning to the coastal communities near Cilacap, Sugun said: "I guess it was something like that."
Aid started to trickle into the area yesterday but people said they were expecting to have to wait several days for help.