MAMUJU, Indonesia (AP) – Indonesian rescuers have recovered more bodies from the rubble of houses and buildings in a 6.2 magnitude earthquake, which on Sunday raised the death toll to 56, while military engineers managed to reopen cracked roads to clean access to emergency aids.
More heavy equipment has reached the city of Mamuju and the neighboring district of Majene on the island of Sulawesi, where the quake was worst hit on Friday night, said Raditya Jati, spokesperson for the National Disaster Management Agency.
Power supply and telephone communication also began to improve.
Thousands were left homeless and more than 800 were injured. More than half are still receiving treatment for serious injuries, Jati said. A total of 47 people died in Mamuju and nine in Majene.
According to Jati, at least 415 homes in Majene were damaged and about 15,000 people were relocated to shelters. The agency still collects data from the environment.
Mamuju, the provincial capital of nearly 300,000 people, was littered with rubble from collapsed buildings. The governor’s office building was nearly blown up by the earthquake and a shopping mall was reduced to a crumpled hulk. Two hospitals were damaged.
The disaster agency said the army corps engineers had cleared the road connecting Mamuju and Majene, which had been blocked by landslides. They also rebuilt a damaged bridge.
Many people on the island of Sulawesi are still plagued by an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 that devastated the city of Palu in 2018 and caused a tsunami that collapsed the ground 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 ground.
Indonesia, home to more than 260 million people, is regularly 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 Ocean.
A massive 9.1 magnitude earthquake on the island of Sumatra in western Indonesia in December 2004 caused a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
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Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia.