More rescuers and volunteers were yesterday deployed in devastated areas on Indonesia’s main island of Java to search for the dead and missing from an earthquake that killed at least 268 people on Monday.
With many missing, some remote areas still unreachable and more than 1,000 people injured in the magnitude 5.6 quake, the death toll was likely to rise. Hospitals near the epicenter on the densely populated island were already overwhelmed, and patients hooked up to drips lay on stretchers and cots in tents set up outside, awaiting further treatment.
More than 12,000 army personnel were yesterday deployed to bolster search efforts that are being carried out by more than 2,000 joint forces of police, the search and rescue agency and volunteers, National Disaster Mitigation Agency Head Suharyanto said.
Photo: Antara Foto / Wahyu Putro A / via Reuters
Suharyanto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said aid was reaching thousands of people left homeless who fled to temporary shelters where supplies can be distributed only by foot over the rough terrain.
TV reports showed police, soldiers and other rescue personnel using jackhammers, circular saws and sometimes their bare hands and farm tools, digging desperately in the worst-hit area of Cijendil village where tonnes of mud, rocks and trees were left from a landslide.
Hundreds of police, soldiers and residents dug through the debris with their bare hands, shovels and hoes as heavy rain hindered their efforts.
Photo: EPA-EFE
By yesterday morning, the government appeared to be focused on finding bodies, and wherever possible, survivors. Authorities struggled to bring tractors and other heavy equipment over washed-out roads after earthquake-triggered landslides crashed onto the hilly hamlets.
Residents said that the government had been slow to respond to the earthquake.
Muhammad Tohir, 48, was sitting in his living room with family in Cijendil when the catastrophe struck. Although his family managed to make it out, his sister and her two children was crushed by a landslide, a few kilometers from his house.
“When I came to my sister’s house, I was devastated by what I saw,” Tohir said. “Dozens of houses had been buried by landslides... I feel like doomsday.”
He said more than 40 houses in his sister’s neighborhood were buried under tonnes of mud, with at least 45 people buried alive, including Tohir’s sister and her two children.
Tohir, along with other residents in the area, searched for the missing using farm tools and managed to pull out two bodies buried under as much as 6m of mud. Two days later, rescue personnel arrived to help in the search.
“The government was too slow to respond to this disaster,” Tohir said. “They should be bringing in heavy equipment to speed this up.”
However, he said that he would not give up until they pull his sister and his nieces out of the mud.
In several hard-hit areas, water as well as food and medical supplies were being distributed from trucks, and authorities had deployed military personnel to distribute food, medicine, blankets and field tents, as well as water tankers.
Volunteers and rescue personnel erected more temporary shelters for those left homeless in several villages of Cianjur district.
Most were barely protected by makeshift shelters that were lashed by heavy monsoon downpours. Only a few were lucky to be protected by tarpaulin-covered tents.
They said they were running low on food, blankets and other aid.
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