Java quake victims ‘mostly children’
Rescue teams search rubble after tremors jolt Indonesia's most populous province, wrecking a town and burying at least one village under a landslide
Quakes jolted two locations on the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire, triggering landslides and killing more than 100 children in one.
In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo, who was on the scene on Tuesday, urged rescue workers to prioritise victims trapped in rubble in a devastated West Java town, where up to 162 people were killed and hundreds more injured.
The epicentre of the 5.6-magnitude quake was in a mountainous area of Indonesia’s most populous province, damaging the town of Cianjur and burying at least one village under a landslide. Many fatalities were people trapped under collapsed buildings.
Jokowi, as the president is known, gave condolences and pledged emergency support. New houses will be designed for disasters, he said.
Quake victims fled to a hospital parking lot in Cianjur overnight, some treated in makeshift tents, others hooked up to drips on the pavement, with medical staff stitched patients by torchlight.
“Everything collapsed beneath me and I was crushed beneath a child,” said Cucu, 48. “Two of my kids survived, I dug them up ... Two others I brought here, one is still missing,” she said through tears.
Hundreds of police officers were deployed to assist. “Today’s main task is evacuating victims,” said police spokesperson Dedi Prasetyo.
West Java governor Ridwan Kamil said 162 people were killed, many of them children. The disaster agency said 31 were still missing. “Most of the casualties are children, because at 1pm they were still at school,” he said. Authorities were operating “under the assumption that the number of injured and death will rise with time”, the governor said, with at least one village buried by landslides.
“The area is spread out ... on top of that, the roads are damaged,” search & rescue head Henri Alfiandi said, adding 13,000 people were evacuated.
The quake, 10km deep, damaged 2,200 homes and displaced over 5,000 people.
In the Solomon Islands, a nation of hundreds of islands roughly 6,000km to the east, authorities withdrew a tsunami alert after two powerful tremors on Tuesday, damaging Australia’s embassy and the airport and triggering power cuts in the capital Honiara. No injuries were reported.
The first quake hit offshore at a depth of 15km, about 16km from Malango, said the USGS, which revised the magnitude down from 7.3 to 7.0. A second quake, which registered 6.0, struck nearby 30 minutes later.
The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt 40,000km long, where different plates on the earth’s crust meet, making it volcano- and quake-prone.