The authorities of Indonesia They raised the death toll from the earthquake that struck the West Java province on Monday to 310. The rescue teams continue to work to locate 24 disappeared, although they acknowledge the “scarce” chances of finding them alive.
In addition to the 310 deaths, the magnitude 5.6 earthquake has also left more than 2,000 injured and more than 62,000 displaced, according to data from the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB).
Children account for a third of the at least 272 people who died after an earthquake hit Indonesia on Monday. Experts say the disaster calls attention to poor building standards in rural areas. https://t.co/EUQXwAiNDS
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More than a third of the fatalities are children, since the tremors hit the populated province of West Java during school hours and wreaked havoc in dozens of educational centers.
The search and rescue teams recovered this Friday 17 bodies that were buried under the rubble and landslides caused by the tremors, which devastated various areas of the town of Cianjur, the epicenter of the earthquake and which has some 170,000 inhabitants.
Although the authorities acknowledge that the chances of finding survivors four days after the initial impact are slim, they assured that efforts to locate them will continue with the same intensity.
Monday’s earthquake is the deadliest in Indonesia since September 2018, when an earthquake and tsunami on the island of Celebes (Sulawesi) claimed the lives of more than 4,300 people in the country, which sits on the so-called Ring of Fuego del Pacífico, an area of great seismic and volcanic activity in which some 7,000 earthquakes are recorded each year, most of them moderate.
With information from Efe.
