Search for tsunami survivors in Indonesia

PANGANDARAN, Indonesia -- Indonesia pledged to build a nationwide tsunami alert system as soldiers pulled bodies from ravaged beaches, homes and hotels Tuesday. Parents searched tearfully for their children and the death toll hit at least 463, with nearly 280 people missing.

Bodies covered in white sheets piled up at makeshift morgues, while others lay beneath the blazing sun in the tourist resort of Pangandaran, a 6-month-old baby among them.

The search for survivors continued Tuesday, with parents among the last to give up.

"The water was too strong," said Irah as she dug through a pile of rubble with her bare hands, close to the spot where she last saw her 6-year-old son. "Oh God. Eki, where are you?"

The magnitude-7.7 undersea quake on Monday triggered walls of water more than 6 feet high that crashed into a 110-mile stretch of beach on Java island, an area spared by the devastating 2004 tsunami.

The waves destroyed houses, restaurants and hotels and tossed boats, cars and motorbikes far inland.

The death toll rose Tuesday to at least 463, with nearly 280 more missing, according to Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie. The numbers may go higher.

"We are still finding many bodies. Many are stuck in the ruins of the houses," said police chief Syamsuddin Janieb.

At least 42,000 people fled their homes, either because they were destroyed or in fear of another tsunami, adding to the difficulty of counting casualties.

Monday's quake struck at 3:24 p.m. about 150 miles beneath the ocean floor, causing tall buildings to sway hundreds of miles away in the capital, Jakarta.

After the quake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and Japan's Meteorological Agency issued warnings of a possible tsunami. It struck Java about an hour later.

Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman said Indonesia received the bulletins 45 minutes before the tsunami hit but did not announce them because they did not want to cause unnecessary alarm.

He noted there was no effective way to spread a warning without a system of sirens or alarms in place. Indonesia now planned to speed up plans for a nationwide warning system, he said.

Indonesia was hardest hit by a 2004 tsunami that killed at least 216,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations -- with more than half the deaths occurring in Sumatra island's Aceh province.

Though the country started to install a warning system after that disaster, it is still in the early stages. The government had been planning to extend the alert system to Java -- which was hit by a quake in May that killed more than 5,800 people -- in 2007.

Answering reporters' questions as to why no warning was issued Monday, Vice President Jusuf Kalla claimed there was no need because most people had fled inland after the earthquake.

"After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills ... so in actual fact there was a kind of natural early warning system," he said.

However, of dozens of people interviewed by The Associated Press in Pangandaran on Tuesday, only one person said he felt a slight tremor. None said there was a mass movement of people to higher ground before the tsunami, though some residents recognized the danger when they saw the wall of water approaching.