Earthquake leaves over 200 dead in Indonesia Search underway as magnitude-5.6
Rescuers were 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 at least 268 people.
A further 151 people remain missing and more than 1,000 were injured, the country’s National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB) said.
The 5.6-magnitude quake hit the Cianjur region in West Java at about 1:21 p.m. local time on Monday at a depth of 10 kilometres (6.2 miles), according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), causing buildings to collapse while school classes were underway.
The scale of the death and destruction caused by the quake became increasingly clear on Tuofficials reported earlier discrepancies in the reported death toll.
More than 22,000 homes were destroyed and over 58,000 people have been displaced, BNPB Major General Suharyanto said on Tuesday.
Photos showed buildings reduced to rubble, with bricks and scraps of broken metal strewn on the streets.
“The majority of those who died were children,” West Java’s governor, Ridwan Kamil, told reporters Monday, adding the death toll was likely to increase further. “So many incidents occurred at several Islamic schools.”
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 South America on the other.
In 2004, 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.
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