In Indonesia, 56 People Are Killed And Hundreds Are Injured In a Quake

(CTN News) – As a result of an earthquake that struck main Indonesian island of Java, at least 56 people have been killed, and hundreds have been injured. This is according to local officials.

There was an earthquake of 5.6 magnitude that struck in Cianjur town in West Java, at a shallow depth of 10km (six miles), according to data provided by the US Geological Survey.

In videos posted on social media, you can clearly see that some buildings have been reduced almost entirely to rubble and debris strewn along the streets.

The U.S. government warns of possible aftershocks and says the death toll could rise as a result.

I would like to point out that the area where the earthquake hit is densely populated and extremely vulnerable to landslides, with poorly built houses. Rescuers are currently in the Indonesia process of evacuating people from collapsed buildings, and reports indicate that a woman and her baby have been saved, according to local media.

In this report, Kompas TV reports that 56 people have died in Cianjur town as a result of the earthquake and more than 700 others have been injured.

As a result of the fact that a large number of people are still trapped at the scene due to a landslide blocking one area of the scene, doctors fear that the number of injuries and fatalities will increase.

According to AFP news agency, he was quoted as saying that most Indonesia injuries were caused by people becoming trapped in buildings caused by debris. This caused them to sustain bone fractures.

According to him, ambulances keep arriving from the villages to the hospital on a daily basis. A lot of villages have not been evacuated yet, and there are a lot of families who are still alive.”

In addition, he said that the overwhelming number of patients would need more health workers to deal with them. He also said that there was an outage of power in the area, which prevented doctors at the main hospital from operating on patients.

It was reported in a statement from the Indonesia National Disaster Mitigation Agency that dozens of buildings had been damaged in the Cianjur region. The facilities include a hospital as well as an Islamic boarding school.

Besides the city of Banda Aceh about 100 km away, where people who live in high-rise buildings were evacuated, the tremor could also be felt in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

During the tremor, which started at 13:21 Western Indonesian time (WIT) on Monday, workers rushed out of buildings in the civic and business district as the buildings began shaking.

At the time, the floor beneath me started shaking violently. I felt the tremor clearly. I tried not to think about what it was, but it became increasingly intense and lasted quite some time,” lawyer Mayadita Waluyo told AFP.

Reuters said that an office worker named Ahmad Ridwan told them: “We’re used to these [earthquake] happenings in Jakarta, but people were so nervous just now, so we panicked as well.”

In Indonesia, which is located in the Pacific Ocean on the rim of the “ring of fire” area of tectonic activity, earthquakes are common.

A 2018 earthquake that struck the island of Sulawesi killed more than 2,000 people, making it one of the most devastating earthquakes to strike the country in recent memory.

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