Indonesia earthquake: Rescuers dig through debris to find survivors, death toll over 160

By Team Newsable | First Published Nov 22, 2022, 11:35 AM IST

Indonesia straddles the "Pacific Ring of Fire", a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the Earth's crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes. On Monday, a strong earthquake struck Indonesia's West Java region, killing more than 160 people. Rescuers are still looking for survivors who may be buried beneath the wreckage.

In search of survivors after a strong earthquake that destroyed homes and other structures in a densely populated part of Indonesia's West Java province and left more than 100 dead, rescuers are searching through rubble on Tuesday. On Monday, a strong earthquake struck Indonesia's West Java region, killing more than 160 people. Rescuers are still looking for survivors who may be buried beneath the wreckage.

The 5.6-magnitude earthquake's epicentre occurred close to the town of Cianjur in West Java's hilly region, roughly 75 kilometres (45 miles) southeast of the nation's capital, Jakarta. There are about 2.5 million people living in the area. This caused buildings to fall as school lessons were in session.

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Photos showed streets littered with bricks and metal fragments, and buildings reduced to rubble. According to the BNPB, hundreds more were evacuated along with more than 700 injuries. According to humanitarian organisation Save the Children, which claimed that more than 50 schools had been affected, the strong earthquakes pulled kids out of their classrooms. Electricity was down, disrupting communications, authorities said, while landslides were blocking evacuations in some areas.

In a hospital parking lot, hundreds of people were receiving care, some of them under an emergency tent. In some parts of Cianjur, people were gathered on mats in open fields or in tents while the buildings around them were in ruins.

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The "Ring of Fire," a region around the Pacific Ocean that frequently experiences earthquakes and volcanic activity, passes through Indonesia. It runs from Japan and Indonesia on one side of the Pacific to California and South America on the other, making it one of the seismically active zones on the world.

In 2004, a tsunami that struck 14 nations and killed 226,000 people along the Indian Ocean coastline—more than half of them in Indonesia—was caused by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred off the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra.

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