JAKARTA, Aug. 15 -- The rescue teams cannot get through. That is the detail repeating across emergency dispatches from Flores Island on Saturday, eight hours after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off its northern coast and 20 bodies were already found near a port town that sits 42 miles from the epicenter, not in it.

The closest regency to where the ground fractured, Nagekeo, went quiet. Communications signals into the area collapsed with the buildings. Indonesia's national disaster mitigation agency, BNPB, said about 2,000 residents in Nagekeo had been evacuated before the blackout set in, but no emergency teams had yet made it in. What they will find when they do, officials have not said.

Fathur Rahman, head of the rescue agency in ...