One senior Red Cross official described the situation as “nightmarish”. Amongst the rubble bodies decompose in the sweltering heat, there are widespread shortages of food and water while armed looters now roam what is left of the streets.

Yesterday officials confirmed that the death toll from last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia’s Sulawesi island has risen to 1,407.

The toll though is expected to soar, as most of the confirmed dead have come from Palu, a small city 930 miles northeast of Jakarta, and losses in remote areas remain unknown, as communications are down, and bridges and roads have been destroyed or blocked by landslides.

Hungry survivors said yesterday they were scavenging for food in farms as Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo made a second visit to the area hoping to bolster aid efforts five days after disaster struck.

“The situation in the affected areas is nightmarish,” Jan Gelfand, head of an International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies office in Jakarta, said in a statement.

Yesterday reports continued that humanitarian relief convoys entering Palu were being escorted by soldiers and police.

Adding to the horrors of the last few days several areas around Palu have been affected by liquefaction, which happens when soil shaken by an earthquake behaves like a liquid.

Before-and-after satellite pictures show a largely built-up area just south of Palu’s airport seemingly wiped clean of all signs of life by liquefaction.

Yesterday too there was further concern after the volcano Mount Soputan erupted in North Sulawesi spewing ash19,000 ft into the sky, the eruption most likely triggered by last Friday’s temblor.

Some rescue workers have begun to reach more remote districts in a disaster zone that now encompasses 1.4 million people, but many of the worst affected areas remain cut off.

Johnny Lim, a restaurant owner reached by telephone in Donggala town, told Reuters news agency that people there are on their “last legs,” and that there was no food or water.

“It’s a zombie town. Everything’s destroyed. Nothing’s left,” Mr Lim told reporters.

Aid worker Lian Gogali also described a perilous situation in Donggala, which includes a string of cut-off, small towns along a coast road north of Palu close to the quake’s epicentre.

Residents of Donggala said they feared they had been forgotten as attention focused on the city of Palu, which has been easier to reach.

“Everyone is desperate for food and water. The government is missing,” Ms Gogali said, adding that her aid group had only been able to send in a trickle of rations by motorbike.

Yahdi Basma, a leader from a village south of Palu hoping to get his family on a cargo plane out, told reporters that President Widodo had no idea of the extent of the suffering.

“The president is not hearing about the remote areas, only about the tsunami and about Palu,” he said.

Such criticisms of the Indonesian government have grown and anger mounted at what many see as the country’s notoriously inefficient bureaucracy.

There are those too who are questioning whether the government and authorities could have done more to reduce the loss of life both in terms of better preparedness and in their response once the earthquake and tsunami struck.

Only a few months ago Indonesia shunned outside help when an earthquake struck the island of Lombok.

Following the latest disaster, the government ordered aid supplies to be airlifted in but survivors say there’s little sign of help on Palu’s shattered streets and people appeared increasingly desperate.

Witnesses described growing tensions between armed police and survivors in Palu, as people fight over the limited food and essentials available.

Indonesia’s Internal Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo has come under criticism after making an announcement that survivors could take essentials from shops and the government would later compensate them. The move has been criticised as giving a green light to lawlessness and looting.

Opposition politicians have been quick to condemn the government and President Widodo as he prepares a bid for re-election next year

“In a complex emergency, what is needed is leadership and law and order. At this stage, the government is very weak,” Fadli Zon, deputy speaker of parliament from the opposition nationalist Gerindra party, said on Twitter.

More serious criticisms of the government and authorities however focus on failures to maintain a tsunami warning system set up after a 2004 quake and tsunami killed 226,000 people in 13 countries around the Indian Ocean, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.

According to Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (NDMA), none of the tsunami buoys used to detect the waves had been operational since 2012 due to a lack of funding.

Some of the defunct warning buoys have become moors for fishing boats, destroying the sensitive equipment within, said officials from Indonesia’s meteorological and geophysics agency, known as BMKG,

“We have no manpower to monitor these buoys, and it’s so expensive,” said Rahmat Triyono, the earthquake and tsunami chief at the meteorology agency. “We are doing our best with our limited resources.”

Other questions too concern why BMKG, issued a tsunami warning soon after the quake hit, but lifted it 34 minutes later. Officials have claimed that the tsunami warning was still in place when the killer wave hit coastal areas.

Videos of the wave as it hit Palu taken by residents in high rise buildings showed people on the beach and beachside roads apparently unaware as the massive water surge approached.

Flagging up other failings meanwhile an editorial in The Jakarta Post also pointed out that while disaster-related authorities say public awareness campaigns on natural disasters have continued for years, including in Central Sulawesi, it was evident in how easily buildings collapsed that leaders and city planners had not implemented earthquake-resistant building codes and standards.

Such pressing questions will continue to trouble President Widodo’s government well after the relief and rebuilding programmes from the current disaster are over.

For the moment though politics is the last thing on the minds of both survivors and those emergency and humanitarian workers tasked with saving lives.

Yesterday Indonesian Red Cross workers described how the village of Petobo, just south of Palu, which was home to almost 500 people, had been “wiped off the map”.

“They are finding devastation and tragedy everywhere,” said Iris van Deinse, of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.