A strong, shallow earthquake shook the Indonesian island of Sulawesi just after midnight on Friday, toppling houses and buildings and causing landslides. At least 42 people died.
More than 600 people were injured in the magnitude 6.2 earthquake, which forced people to flee their homes after dark. Authorities were still collecting information on the full extent of the victims and damage in the affected areas.
Yusuf Wahil / AP
There were reports that many people were trapped in the rubble of collapsed houses and buildings.
In a video released by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, a girl trapped in the wreckage of a house screamed for help and said she heard the noise from other family members who were also detained. “Please help me, it hurts,” the girl said to the rescuers, who replied that they were desperate to help her.
Rescue workers said a digger was needed to rescue the girl and others trapped in collapsed buildings. Other images showed a severed bridge and damaged and flattened houses.
The earthquake damaged part of a hospital and patients were moved outside to an emergency tent. Rescue workers struggled to extract seven patients and staff trapped under tons of debris. After several hours, an excavator came to help, and the rescue workers eventually collected four survivors and three bodies.
Another video showed a crying father asking for help to save his children buried under their tumbled down house. “They’re trapped, please help,” he shouted.
Another video showed officials investigating a house that had been completely destroyed.
Thousands of displaced persons were evacuated to temporary shelters.
The earthquake occurred 22 miles south of the Mamuju District in West Sulawesi Province, at a depth of 11 miles, according to the US Geological Survey.
The Indonesian disaster station said the death toll rose to 34 when rescue workers in Mamuju retrieved 26 bodies trapped in the rubble of collapsed houses and buildings.
The agency said in a statement that eight people were killed and 637 others were injured in Mamuju’s neighboring Majene district.
It said at least 300 homes and a health clinic had been damaged, and about 15,000 people were being housed in temporary shelters in the district. Power and telephones were out in many areas.
The secretary of the West Sulawesi administration, Muhammad Idris, told TVOne that the governor’s office building was one of the buildings that collapsed in Mamuju, the provincial capital, and many people are trapped there.
Rescuer Saidar Rahmanjaya said a lack of heavy equipment hindered the operation to remove the debris from collapsed houses and buildings. He said his team was in the process of rescuing 20 people trapped in eight buildings, including the governor’s office, a hospital and hotels.
“We are racing against time to save them,” said Rahmanjaya.
Family members wailed as they watched rescue workers retrieve a loved one’s body from a damaged home in devastated Mamuju. It was put in an orange body bag and taken to be buried.
“Oh my God why did we have to go through this?” called Rina, using one name. “I can’t save my dear sister … forgive me, sister, forgive us, God!”
President Joko Widodo said in a televised address that he had instructed his Social Affairs Minister and the heads of the military, police and disaster station to carry out emergency response and search and rescue operations as soon as possible.
“On behalf of the government and all Indonesian people, I would like to express my deepest condolences to the families of the victims,” Widodo said.
National Search and Rescue Agency chief Bagus Puruhito said rescue workers from the cities of Palu, Makassar, Balikpapan and Jakarta were deployed to assist in Mamuju and Majene.
Two ships were bound for the affected areas from Makassar and Balikpapan with rescue workers and search and rescue equipment, while a Hercules plane with supplies was en route from Jakarta.
Puruhito is already leading more than 4,100 rescue personnel in a separate large-scale search for victims of the crash of a Sriwijaya Air jet in the Java Sea last Saturday.
Among the dead in Majene were three people who died when their homes were razed to the ground by the earthquake while they slept, said Sirajuddin, the head of the district’s disaster relief organization.
Sirajuddin, who bears the same name, said that although the inland earthquake did not have the potential to cause a tsunami, people ran along coastal areas to higher elevations in fear that one might happen.
Landslides were triggered in three locations, blocking a main road connecting Mamuju to the Majene district, said Raditya Jati, the disaster agency spokesman.
On Thursday, a magnitude 5.9 undersea earthquake hit the same region, damaging several homes but causing no apparent casualties.
The Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics, known by the Indonesian acronym BMKG, warned of the dangers of aftershocks and the possibility of a tsunami. The chairman urged people in coastal areas to move to higher areas as a precaution.
Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 260 million people, is often hit 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.
In 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Palu on Sulawesi Island triggered a tsunami and caused the soil to collapse in a phenomenon called liquefaction. More than 4,000 people died, many of the victims buried when entire neighborhoods were swallowed up by the falling ground.
A powerful earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.