Rescuers are digging through debris on Tuesday to find survivors of a powerful earthquake that toppled homes and buildings in a highly populated area of Indonesia’s West Java province, killing more than 100 people.
The earthquake that hit on Monday at a depth of 10 kilometres caused buildings and school classes to collapse.
On Tuesday the death toll rose to 103 people with most crushed under collapsed buildings, according to the country’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPM). Earlier, West Java’s governor, Ridwan Kamil, said more than 160 had been killed.
Photos showed buildings reduced to rubble, with bricks and scraps of broken metal strewn on the streets. More than 700 people were injured, and thousands more were displaced, according to the BNPB.
“The majority of those who died were children,” Kamil told reporters on Monday, adding the death toll was likely to increase further. “So many incidents occurred at several Islamic schools.”
The powerful tremors forced children to flee from their classrooms, according to the aid group Save the Children, which said more than 50 schools had been impacted.
Herman Suherman, a government official in Cianjur, told the media that some residents were trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings. News channel Metro TV showed what happened to hundreds of victims being treated in a hospital parking lot.
Visiting areas affected by the quake on Tuesday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said the government would provide compensation of up to about $3,200 each for owners of heavily damaged homes.
Indonesia sits on the “Ring of Fire,” a band around the Pacific Ocean that sets off frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity. One of the most seismically active zones on the planet, it stretches from Japan and Indonesia on one side of the Pacific to California and Soth America on the other.
In 2002, a 9.1 magnitude quake off Sumatra island in northern Indonesia triggered a tsunami that struck 14 countries, killing 226,000 people along the Indian Ocean coastline, more than half of them in Indonesia.
