At least 56 people were killed and 700 others injured in a magnitude 5.6 earthquake on the Indonesian island of Java on Monday, which rattled skyscrapers as far away as the capital Jakarta. Herman Suherman, managing director of the West Java city of Cianjur, said “at least” 300 people were being treated at a single hospital in the city.
“Most have broken bones after being trapped in the rubble of the buildings,” he reported on Metro TV.
“Many families in the villages have not yet been evacuated”
Shops, a hospital and an Islamic boarding school in the city suffered extensive damage as a result of the quake, according to local press. The media showed several buildings in Cianjur whose roofs had collapsed.
“Hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of houses, were damaged” by the quake, Adam, a spokesman for the Cianjur administration, who has only a first name like many Indonesians, told AFP.
Herman Suherman also reported that relatives of the victims gathered at Sayang Hospital and warned that the number of victims could rise as villagers could still be trapped in the rubble.
“Currently we are treating people who are in an emergency situation in this hospital, ambulances continue to arrive at the hospital from the towns,” he described. “There are many families in the villages that have not yet been evacuated.”
Authorities previously reported that they rescued a woman and a baby trapped in a landslide in Cianjur. “We urge people to stay out of buildings for now as there could be aftershocks,” the director of Indonesia’s meteorological agency, Dwikorita Karnawati, told reporters.
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The epicenter was located near this city about 100 kilometers south of Jakarta, according to the United States Institute of Geological Studies (USGS). The USGS had initially estimated the quake’s magnitude at 5.4.
No casualties or major damage were immediately reported in Jakarta, but in the capital, people ran out of buildings. Hundreds of people waited outside after the quake, some wearing helmets to protect themselves from falling debris, an AFP journalist reported.
Indonesia regularly faces earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, due to its position on the Pacific “ring of fire”, where tectonic plates meet. In 2018, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit Palu, on the island of Sulawesi, killing or missing 4,300 people.
The island of Java, for its part, had been hit by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in 2006, near the city of Yogyakarta (center), which caused around 6,000 deaths and tens of thousands of injuries. A year earlier, an 8.7-magnitude earthquake that struck the Sumatra coast, which hits regularly, killed more than 900 people.
But the country is still marked by the earthquake of December 26, 2004 with a magnitude of 9.1 off the coast of Sumatra. It caused a massive tsunami that killed 220,000 people across the region, including 170,000 in Indonesia alone, one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.
Source: BFM TV
