The death toll from the earthquake that struck Indonesia’s main island of Java on Monday has risen to 268, and many of the dead are schoolchildren, officials have said as rescuers raced against time to find survivors.
The quake, centred in the Cianjur region of West Java province, struck at a shallow depth of 6.2 miles (10km), triggering landslides and damaging buildings, including tens of thousands of homes and dozens of schools.
Henri Alfiandi, the head of the national search and rescue agency (Basarnas) said many of the victims were children who had been at school when the quake hit.
“They were at school, at 1pm, they were still studying,” Alfiandi said at a press conference. Some of those dead were students at an Islamic boarding school. “The challenge is the affected area is spread out … On top of that, the roads in these villages are damaged,” he said.
Provisional data released by the authorities and cited by Save the Children said about 51 education sites were affected, including 30 elementary schools, 12 junior high schools, one high school, five vocational schools and one special school.
At a local hospital, overwhelmed by the number of patients, the injured lay on the floor on mattresses and blankets, or under makeshift tents. On Monday night, victims were treated in the dark, under torchlight, due to widespread power cuts.
“Everything collapsed beneath me and I was crushed beneath this child,” Cucu, a 48-year-old resident, told Reuters from the crowded hospital parking area. “Two of my kids survived, I dug them up … Two others I brought here, and one is still missing,” she said through tears.
In one area of the hospital grounds, some victims held cardboard signs asking for food and shelter.
Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, who travelled to Cianjur on Tuesday, said he had instructed teams to “prioritise evacuating victims that are still trapped under rubble”.
Efforts to reach victims have been complicated by power failures, damaged roads and more than 145 aftershocks. Many of those living in affected areas slept outside on Monday night, surrounded by fallen debris, fearing further tremors.
On Tuesday, hundreds of police officers were deployed to assist in rescue efforts, Dedi Prasetyo, the national police spokesperson, told the Antara state news agency.
Officials were focused on the worst-hit areas of Cugenang, an area that was struck by a landslide following the quake – one of several reported across the region. TV footage showed people digging the earth by hand using hoes, sticks, crowbars and other tools.
“At least six of my relatives are still unaccounted for, three adults and three children,” Zainuddin, a resident of Cugenang, told Reuters. “If it was just an earthquake, only the houses would collapse, but this is worse because of the landslide. In this residential area there were eight houses, all of the which were buried and swept away.”
According to the national disaster agency, 1,000 people were injured, at least 22,000 homes damaged and more than 58,000 people displaced.
The scale of the devastation was continuing to emerge, said Elkhan Rahimov, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ (IFRC) delegation in Indonesia. “Jakarta was 100km away from the epicentre but it was strongly felt. One can imagine the regions where maybe people live close to each other, there are smaller houses, not so much investment in the infrastructure of the houses,” he said. The IFRC was focused on meeting people’s immediate needs for shelter, first aid and drinking water.
The US Geological Surveys’s Pager system estimated that up to 242,000 people were exposed to “very strong shaking” and up to 978,000 people to “strong shaking”.
Indonesia is especially vulnerable to earthquakes because of its position on the Pacific “ring of fire”, the most seismically and volcanically active zone in the world. The quake on Monday was especially devastating because it struck on land at a relatively shallow depth.
In February, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake killed at least 25 people and injured more than 460 others in West Sumatra province. In January 2021, a quake of similar magnitude killed more than 100 people and injured nearly 6,500 in West Sulawesi province.
A powerful Indian Ocean quake and tsunami in 2004 killed nearly 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
