The death toll caused by the earthquake that shook the Indonesian island of Java on Monday rose from 268 to 310, according to the latest report from the national agency for response to natural disasters.
The agency’s director, Suharyanto (many Indonesians go by one name), said the quake, measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale, it also triggered landslides and destroyed several residential buildings. in the west of the island, noting that 24 people are still missing, who have already been identified.
According to Henri Alfiandi, head of the national emergency services, the search will continue until Monday, or even longer, if not all the bodies are found by then.
“The problems are ground instabilitythe thickness of the landslides, aggravated by the continuous rains, and the fear of aftershocks,” Alfiandi explained to the local television channel Kompas.
Many of the victims are children, some of whom were in classrooms.????????
A seven-year-old girl, for whom rescuers had been searching for several days, was found dead on Friday in the ruins of a collapsed house in the Cianjur district, near the epicenter of the quake.
“The body was immediately handed over to the family, who, devastated, immediately proceeded to the funeral,” said Jeksen Kolibu, a 28-year-old rescuer.
Several rescue teams tried Thursday to clear rubble from the house where the family thought the girl was at the time of the earthquake.
However, he ended up finding himself in the rubble of another house, under three layers of cement, with very little room to breathe????????
The discovery on Wednesday night of a 6-year-old boy, Azka, who survived under rubble for two daysrevived hopes of finding more survivors.
According to the latest earthquake report, more than 2,000 people were injuredSome 56,000 houses were damaged and more than 62,000 residents were left homeless, Suharyanto said.
Located on the so-called “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific, where the tectonic plates meet, Indonesia, with more than 270 million inhabitants, regularly faces earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
This is the deadliest earthquake in the country since 2018????????
About 7,000 earthquakes are recorded annually, most of which are moderate.
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 6,500 in West Sulawesi province.
One of the country’s deadliest catastrophes occurred in 2004, when a strong earthquake in the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a “tsunami” that claimed more than 226,000 lives in a dozen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, most of them In Indonesia. .
Source: Observadora
