House after house has been smashed, with surviving structures seemingly dotted at random among the rubble.

The cracks in the roads vary in width from 10 centimetres to 2 metres, and appear again and again with an unerring consistency.

Families and neighbours huddle on their front porches together, avoiding the baking sun and commiserating over all they have lost.

Here it was the earthquake, not the tsunami, that has done most of the damage.

Balaroa was one of the hardest hit places when the magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck on Friday.

It’s here, and in nearby Sigi, that scores of bodies remain unaccounted for.

Authorities acknowledge that the death toll, which stood at 1407 on Wednesday afternoon, will rise once rescue workers get into the more remote areas and begin the process of recovering bodies.

Five days after the big quake, locals tell Fairfax Media that food and water aid from the Indonesian government is yet to reach them, even though they are just 10 kilometres from central Palu.

“We are eating noodles, rice, and salt,” Sangati, tells Fairfax Media.

“We are rationing our food so it lasts. Some days we have one meal, some days we have two, depending on the supplies we have.

Sangati is sitting underneath a brown tarpaulin with a group of six other women, three men and two kids, avoiding the baking afternoon sun.

At night, she says, their group – drawn from four houses on the street – increases to about 30 people sleeping on a ground sheet, thrown over cracked concrete.

She points at her house across the street.

When the earthquake struck, she says, the doors got jammed shut and they had to smash their way out the front windows.

“The moment it struck, the house didn’t shake. It went up and down, like a thumping, like something was hammering the earth.”

The group is drinking and washing in water that has run into one of the larger cracks that has opened up in the road in front of them. That crack, she says gesturing with her hand, was 10cm wide after big the quake hit.

It’s now at least 30cm.

“If someone dropped us water, we would drink it,” she says with a wry smile. “But there is no point in begging.”

Sangati wants Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s government, already struggling with the destruction wrought by the earthquake that hit Lombok nearly 8 weeks ago, to do more.

“We believe Jokowi will deliver but we have to patient, he has a lot on his plate.”

About 50 metres down the road, Tamrin, 64, tells Fairfax Media that “not even a glass of water has reached us”.

“We will survive another day or two on what we have but that will be it. We need the government to do more. We are relying on the central government to give us assistance because the local government is also facing this disaster.”

Tamrin’s house has been completely destroyed. His son Bobi, 38, lives across the street. Bobi’s house is still standing, but he dare not sleep inside in case another major earthquake hits.

So the pair, along with 11 other family members, are sleeping outside.

It’s a story repeated over and over again in Balaroa, and throughout the region.

Four hundred metres up the street, turn left, and a team of workers from Basarnas – the national search and rescue agency – watches on as huge earthmoving equipment tries to cut a path into a housing estate that has been smashed.

Roofs have been flung metres. Walls have collapsed on each other. There is rubble everywhere.
It’s difficult to tell where one house ends and the next one starts – as if someone picked up the entire housing estate and dropped it into a blender.

Warto, one of the Basarnas workers, tell us that about 4000 people lived in this area.

“There were about 500 houses here. We think about 60 per cent of the people have been buried here, and about 40 per cent lived,” he says.

“Not a single house survived. Some sank five metres [when the quake hit], some were shifted sideways as much as 15 metres.”

Once a path has been dug through into the housing estate, those who have lived will be brought in by the rescue workers to identify the remains of their houses and point to rooms their dead relatives might be buried in.

Warto says that so far they have found just one person alive in the wreckage – and it took an entire day to get that survivor out.

“Now we believe it will just be bodies.”

To donate, visit Red Cross Indonesia Earthquakes and Tsunami Appeal, Oxfam Australia, World Vision, CARE Australia