MATARAM, Indonesia, Aug 6, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Indonesia Monday sent
rescuers fanning out across the holiday island of Lombok and evacuated more
than 2,000 tourists after a powerful earthquake killed at least 98 people and
damaged thousands of buildings.
The shallow 6.9-magnitude quake sparked terror among tourists and locals
alike, coming just a week after another deadly tremor surged through Lombok
and killed 17 people.
Rescuers on Monday searched for survivors in the rubble of houses,
mosques and schools destroyed in the latest disaster on Sunday evening.
National disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said there were
fears a number of people were trapped in the ruins of a collapsed mosque in
the northern village of Lading-Lading. Footage he posted on Twitter showed
the large concrete mosque had pancaked.
A lack of heavy equipment and shattered roads were hampering efforts to
reach survivors in the mountainous north and east of the island, which had
been hardest hit.
Najmul Akhyar, the head of North Lombok district, estimated that 80
percent of that region was damaged by the quake.
“We expect the number of fatalities to keep rising,” Nugroho said. “All
victims who died are Indonesians.”
He said up to 20,000 people may have had to quit their homes on Lombok
and paramedics, food and medication were badly needed.
The spokesman said search and rescue teams also rescued between 2,000 and
2,700 tourists from the Gili Islands, three tiny, coral-fringed tropical
islands a few kilometres off the northwest coast of Lombok.
Authorities initially said 1,200 people were stuck on the islands but
scaled up the figure early in the evening. Some tourists chose to stay
behind.
Footage posted online by Nugroho showed hundreds crowded onto powder-
white beaches desperately awaiting transport off the normally paradise Gilis.
“We cannot evacuate all of them all at once because we don’t have enough
capacity on the boats,” Muhammad Faozal, the head of the tourism agency in
West Nusa Tenggara province, told AFP, adding two navy vessels were on their
way.
“It’s understandable they want to leave the Gilis, they are panicking.”
By early afternoon, hundreds of weary tourists had arrived with their
baggage at Bangsal harbour, the main link between Lombok and the Gilis.
Margret Helgadottir, a holidaymaker from Iceland, described people
screaming as the roof of her hotel on one of the islands collapsed.
“We just froze: thankfully we were outside,” she told AFP tearfully from
a harbour in Lombok to where she had been evacuated. “Everything went black,
it was terrible.”
Seven Indonesian holidaymakers died on the largest of the three islands,
Gili Trawangan, while another local woman died on nearby Bali.
– Night of aftershocks –
But it was Lombok which bore the brunt of Sunday evening’s quake.
The shallow tremor sent thousands of residents and tourists scrambling
outdoors, where many spent the night as strong aftershocks including one of
5.3-magnitude rattled the island.
The quake knocked out power in many areas and parts of Lombok remained
without electricity on Monday.
Hundreds of bloodied and bandaged victims were treated outside damaged
hospitals in the main city of Mataram and other hard-hit areas.
Patients lay on beds under wards set up in tents, surrounded by drip
stands and monitors, as doctors in blue scrubs attended to them.
Anguished relatives were huddled around loved ones in front of the main
clinic in Mataram, as medical staff struggled to cope with hundreds of
patients. Many were yet to be attended to despite spending the night out in
the open.
“I feel restless sleeping in a tent, I can’t be at peace,” Nurhayati
told AFP outside one hospital where she had brought her sick 70-year-old
mother.
“What we really need now are paramedics, we are short-staffed. We also
need medications,” Supriadi, a spokesman for Mataram general hospital, told
AFP.
Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, who was in Lombok for a
security conference when the earthquake struck, described on Facebook how his
hotel room on the 10th floor shook violently.
“Walls cracked, it was quite impossible to stand up,” he said.
Bali’s international airport suffered damage to its terminal but the
runway was unaffected and operations had returned to normal. Disaster agency
officials said. Lombok airport was also operating.
Indonesia, one of the world’s most disaster-prone nations, straddles the
so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide and many of
the world’s volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.
In 2014, a devastating tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.3 undersea
earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in western Indonesia killed 220,000
people in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.