John Irvine:

It's a room with a view of some of the worst earthquake devastation ever seen. The neighborhood of Balaroa has ceased to exist. To wipe it out, the earthquake moved a mountain, or at least half of one. And it fell upon this affluent part of Palu City.

Where there had been neat streets leading to a decorative mosque, there is now complete destruction; 900 families had their world fall apart. Many were consumed by the land on which they lived. This is a satellite picture of Balaroa before the quake. This image shows the district today.

It's scenes like this that persuade the powers that be to issue the statement the death toll is likely to rise. What's happened to this neighborhood is one of the main reasons that the Indonesian government is predicting the death toll from this double dose of natural disasters will run into thousands.

Henranchia and a relative have come here to look for his wife. But he holds out no great hope of ever seeing her again dead or alive.

"After the first tremor, I told her to get our two children out of the house," he said. "Then the second tremor happened, and she was literally swallowed by the earth right before my eyes."

Emergency teams only reached this area today. And so comprehensive is its eradication, they don't expect to find any survivors here.

A funeral director of sorts overseeing a mass burial in the hills above Palu today. While most of the bodies were unclaimed, this woman knew her husband was among them. She's having to cope with not just becoming a widow, but with the knowledge that her daughter has been missing since Friday. It seems she lost both husband and child to one of the waves of mud that engulfed parts of this city in the blink of an eye.