‘Race against time’ to rescue survivors
Indonesian rescuers used jackhammers, circular saws and sometimes their bare hands yesterday to shift the rubble of flattened buildings as they searched for the dead and missing from an earthquake that killed at least 268 people.
With many missing, some remote areas still unreachable and more than 1000 people injured in the 5.6 magnitude quake, the death toll was likely to rise. Hospitals near the epicentre on the densely populated island of Java were already overwhelmed, and patients hooked up to IV drips lay on stretchers and cots in tents set up outside, awaiting further treatment.
The quake was centred on the rural, mountainous Cianjur district, which is home to more than 2.5 million people, including about 175,000 Cianjur town.
National Disaster Mitigation Agency head Suharyanto, who uses one name, told reporters that 1083 people were injured and at least 151 missing. But not all of the dead have been identified, so it’s possible some the bodies pulled from the rubble are of people on the missing list.
Rescue operations were focused on about a dozen locations in Cianjur, where people are still believed trapped, said Endra Atmawidjaja, the public works and housing spokesperson.
“We are racing against time to rescue people,” Atmawidjaja said.
Initial rescue attempts were hampered by damaged roads and bridges and power outages, and a lack of equipment. By yesterday, power supplies and phone communications had begun to improve, and
Atmawidjaja said seven excavators and 10 large trucks had been deployed from neighbouring areas to clear roads.
The country of more than 270 million people is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire”.
In February, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake killed at least 25 people and injured more than 460 in West Sumatra province. In January 2021, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake killed more than 100 people and injured nearly 6500 in West Sulawesi province. A powerful Indian Ocean quake and tsunami in 2004 killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.