MAMUJU, Indonesia (AP) – Indonesian rescuers recover several bodies from the rubble of houses and buildings knocked down by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake, raising the death toll to 56 on Sunday, while military engineers have managed to reopen broken roads to empty access to relief goods.
More heavy equipment arrived in the worst-hit town of Mamuju and the neighboring Majene district on the island of Sulawesi, where the quake struck on Friday night, said Raditya Jati, a spokeswoman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.
Power supply and telephone communications have also begun to improve.
Thousands were left homeless and more than 800 were injured, with more than half still receiving treatment for serious injuries, Jati said. A total of 47 people died in Mamuju and nine in Majene.
Jati said at least 415 houses in Majene were damaged and about 15,000 people were moved to shelters. The agency is still collecting data from the area.
Mamuju, the provincial capital of nearly 300,000 people, was strewn with debris from collapsed buildings. The governor’s office building was nearly flattened by the earthquake and a mall reduced to a crumpled hulk. Two hospitals were damaged.
The disaster agency said the army’s corps of engineers had cleared the road linking Mamuju to Majene, which was blocked by landslides. They also rebuilt a damaged bridge,
Many on the island of Sulawesi are still haunted by a 7.5-magnitude earthquake that devastated the city of Palu in 2018 and triggered a tsunami that caused the earth to collapse in a phenomenon called liquefaction. More than 4,000 people were killed, including many who were buried when entire neighborhoods were swallowed up in the fallen earth.
Indonesia, home to over 260 million people, is frequently affected by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis due to its location on the “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific basin.
A massive 9.1 magnitude earthquake on the island of Sumatra in western Indonesia in December 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
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Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia.