Dozens of people have been killed and hundreds injured after a 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia’s main island of Java, triggering landslides and collapsing buildings.
The US Geological Survey said the quake was centred in the Cianjur region of West Java province at a depth of 6.2 miles (10km).
Ridwan Kamil, the governor of West Java, told reporters that 56 people had been killed and that the death toll was expected to risee.
“So many buildings crumbled and shattered,” he said. “There are residents trapped in isolated places ... so we are under the assumption that the number of injured and deaths will rise with time.”
Gen Suharyanto, the head of the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) , said the nearby Sayang hospital had no power after the quake, hampering efforts to treat victims, and that more medical staff were needed.
Mus Mustopa, who lives in Padaluyu, a village in Cianjur, told Indonesia’s Kompas TV he helped a family recover the body of an 80-year-old woman who had died in the quake. It happened suddenly, he said. “I wasn’t prepared and saw houses reduced to rubble … Some 50 houses are damaged, with around 10 being heavily damaged.”
Several landslides were reported across Cianjur. Dozens of buildings were damaged, including an Islamic boarding school, a hospital and other public facilities, the BNPB said. Information was still being collected about the extent of casualties and damage, the agency added.
Rescue workers and volunteers searched for victims who were trapped or injured beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.
“I fainted. It was very strong,” Hasan, a construction worker who is being treated at the Cianjur regional hospital, told the Associated Press. “I saw my friends running to escape from the building. But I was too late to get out and was hit by the wall.”
The quake was felt in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, about 62 miles away, where some buildings were evacuated, and highrises were shaken.
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”.
Mayadita Waluyo, a 22-year-old lawyer, told Agence France-Presse that panicked workers ran for the exits of their building in Jakarta as the quake struck.
“I was working when the floor under me was shaking. I could feel the tremor clearly,” she said, adding that she walked down from the 14th floor.
Indonesia’s meteorological agency warned residents near to where the quake was centres to watch out for more tremors. “We call on people to stay outside the buildings for now as there might be potential aftershocks,” Dwikorita Karnawati, the directory of the agency, told reporters.
Indonesia is especially vulnerable to earthquakes because of its position on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, the most seismically and volcanically active zone in the world.
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.
