Indonesian rescue workers are racing to get to people still stuck in the rubble a day after an earthquake destroyed a town in West Java, killing dozens of people and hurting hundreds more when buildings fell down.
A police spokesman named Dedi Prasetyo told the Antara news agency on Tuesday that hundreds of police officers were helping with rescue efforts in Cianjur, the town closest to where the shallow 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit. The town of 175,000 people is in a mountainous part of West Java, which has more people than any other province in Indonesia.
“The most important thing for staff to do today is to get people out of the area,” Prasetyo said.
Ridwan Kamil, the governor of West Java, said that the quake on Monday killed at least 162 people, many of them children, and hurt more than 300. The number of deaths was also confirmed by Indonesia’s National Disaster Agency (BNPB).
The governor said that some people were still stuck in isolated places and that the number of deaths could go up.
He said that the authorities were working with the idea that the number of people hurt and killed would go up over time.
Some of the dead were students at an Islamic boarding school, while others were killed in their own homes when their roofs or walls fell on them.
“The room fell apart, and my legs were buried under the rubble. “Everything happened so quickly,” Aprizal Mulyadi, a 14-year-old student, told the AFP news agency. He said that his friend Zulfikar pulled him to safety. Zulfikar later died after getting stuck under rubble.
Overnight, a hospital parking lot in Cianjur was full of people who had been hurt. Some were being treated in makeshift tents, while others were hooked up to intravenous drips on the sidewalk and doctors stitched them up with flashlights.
Cucu, a 48-year-old resident who went to the hospital, told Reuters, “Everything fell on top of me, and I was crushed under this child.”
“I dug up two of my kids who were still alive. “I brought two others here, but one is still missing,” she sobbed.
Save the Children Indonesia said it would send a team to Cianjur on Tuesday to figure out how bad the disaster was and what the children and adults who were affected by it needed. Also, it is getting ready to give out school tents, back-to-school kits, educational recreation kits, and family hygiene kits.