Nearly 400 people were killed when a powerful earthquake sent a tsunami barreling into the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, officials said yesterday, as hospitals struggled to cope with hundreds of injured and rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.
The Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management put the official death toll at 384 as of last night, all of them in the tsunami-struck city of Palu, but added that the toll was likely to rise.
About 540 people were badly injured, it added.
Photo: Reuters
In the city of about 350,000 people, partially covered bodies lay on the ground near the shore, the day after 1.5m waves came ashore.
There were also concerns over the whereabouts of hundreds of people preparing for a beach festival that had been due to start on Friday evening, the agency said.
Hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of injured people, with many being treated in the open air, while survivors helped to retrieve the remains of those who died.
One man was seen carrying the muddy corpse of a small child.
The tsunami was triggered by a strong earthquake that brought down buildings and sent locals fleeing for higher ground as a churning wall of water crashed into Palu, where there were widespread power blackouts.
Footage captured from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80km from the epicenter, showed waves bring down several buildings and inundating a large mosque.
“I just ran when I saw the waves hitting homes on the coastline,” said Palu resident Rusidanto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
The shallow, magnitude 7.5 earthquake was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and last month.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo said the military was being called in to the disaster-struck region to help search-and-rescue teams get to victims and find bodies.
Earlier, Indonesian National Agency of Search and Rescue chief Muhammad Syaugi told reporters that local staff had found “many” dead bodies.
“We’re particularly concerned about the impact of the earthquake on children, who are more vulnerable to being swept away in tsunamis,” said Tom Howells, of Save the Children.
The quake hit just off central Sulawesi at a depth of 10km in the early evening, the US Geological Survey said.
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