Indonesian Quake Kills at Least 162 and Injures Hundreds, According to the regional governor, Ridwan Kamil, an earthquake that struck the main island of Java in Indonesia has resulted in this disaster.
The United States Geological Survey says that the magnitude 5.6 earthquake that hit the town of Cianjur in West Java happened at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers (about six miles).
Many patients were treated at the scene, while others were sent to nearby hospitals.
As night fell, search and rescue workers kept trying to find and free people they thought were buried under the rubble of buildings that had fallen down.
The area where the earthquake happened is densely populated and prone to landslides. In many places, the earthquake destroyed poorly built homes.
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According to the most recent information collected, the Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) reported that at least 62 people had lost their lives.
Mr. Kamil told the local media that the earthquake had hurt about 326 people, most of whom had broken bones from being crushed in the rubble.
But he warned that some people were still “trapped in isolated places” and that authorities were “working under the assumption that the number of injured and dead will rise over time.”
The governor of West Java also said that the disaster had forced more than 13,000 people to leave their homes, and the BNPB said that the earthquake had damaged more than 2,200 homes.
According to Herman Suherman, the head of administration in the town of Cianjur, the majority of injuries consisted of bone fractures. These injuries were sustained by people who were trapped by debris inside buildings.
Earlier in the day, he was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying, “The ambulances keep on coming from the villages to the hospital.” AFP reported that he made this statement. There are still a large number of families in the villages that have not been moved.
As a result of the earthquake, the power at the hospital was out for several hours, and as a result, many of the injured were treated outside in the parking lot of the hospital, according to the governor of West Java.
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On Monday night, Mr. Kamil posted an update on Twitter stating that it may take up to three days for the area to completely regain access to electrical power. He also said that the officials were having “a lot of trouble” because their cell phone reception was bad and hadn’t gotten better.
The quake was also felt in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which is approximately 100 kilometers away. As a result, people in high-rise buildings had to be evacuated.
During the tremor, which started at 13:21 Western Indonesian Time (WIT) on Monday, office workers in the civic and business districts rushed out of their buildings, according to the agency.
“While I was working, I felt the ground beneath me begin to shake.” I was able to detect the tremor very well. “I made an effort not to react in any way in an effort to better process what it was; however, it became even more intense and continued for a while,” lawyer Mayadita Waluyo told AFP.
“We are used to this [earthquakes] in Jakarta, but people were so nervous just now, so we also panicked,” an office worker named Ahmad Ridwan told the news agency Reuters.
Indonesia, which is located in a tectonically active region known as the “ring of fire” in the Pacific, experiences a high frequency of earthquakes. More than 2,000 people lost their lives in an earthquake that struck Sulawesi in 2018, making Indonesia a nation with a history of catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis.
