Frantic search for earthquake survivors

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday September 4, 2009

Tom Allard Herald Correspondent in Jakarta

RESCUE workers were frantically sifting through rubble with their hands to find victims of Wednesday's earthquake in Indonesia, with many young children missing and feared dead after a landslide buried a games arcade in a village in West Java.The magnitude 7 quake has killed at least 57 people while more than 100 are missing, the Indonesian national disaster management centre said. More than 300 people have been injured and thousands left homeless after poorly constructed homes and buildings buckled and collapsed.Worst hit was Cirangkareng village in Cianjur, West Java, where homes were buried in a landslide."There was a gaming shop which was full of children when the earthquake rocked the cliff," said Agus Ibro, the co-ordinator of the village's crisis centre.At least 13 bodies have been dragged from the debris, including six children. A further 47 were listed as missing, among them 15 children.The work has been painstakingly slow because earth-moving equipment could not reach the area owing to damaged and blocked roads. In Tasikmalaya district on the south coast of Java and closer to the epicentre of the undersea quake, rescue workers and residents reported widespread damage to buildings that had left hundreds homeless and government offices and medical centres destroyed.Eti, a housewife from the village of Lengkongjaya, said it had taken her an hour to crawl out from the debris of her collapsed house. "I screamed for help but no one heard me," she told the detik.com news portal."I had problems breathing and I couldn't see anything because I was covered in dust."In just one subdistrict of Tasikmalaya, more than 1500 homes, 90 schools and 91 prayer rooms or mosques collapsed or were damaged, said Ivan Tagor, an aid worker with World Vision."So many of the buildings were not constructed properly," he said."They did not use steel when making the construction of the concrete walls and pillars."More than 70 aftershocks were recorded overnight and through yesterday, some of them sending search and rescue teams scurrying from the landslide site in Cirangkareng.The earthquake was powerful enough to make office towers sway and shudder in the capital, Jakarta, more than 200 kilometres from the epicentre.Another earthquake struck off the coast of Nabire in Papua yesterday. There has been an unusually high level of seismic activity across the Indonesian archipelago in the past fortnight, with 10 earthquakes registering 5 or higher on the Richter scale.Indonesia is situated where three of the world's tectonic plates €“ the Indo-Australian, Eurasian and Pacific €“ collide and is renowned for its seismic activity.A Monash University geoscientist, Jim Cull, said the activity need not be cause for concern that a bigger quake was imminent. "It's quite unpredictable but the sequence of events suggests that pressure is being released," Professor Cull said."When you should be worried is if there is no activity for a long time because that's when there is a build-up of energy that has to go somewhere."

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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