MAMUJU, Indonesia (AP) – Indonesian rescuers recovered more bodies from the rubble of houses and buildings knocked down by a 6.2-magnitude earthquake, bringing the death toll to 56 on Sunday, while engineers military managed to reopen broken roads to clear access to relief goods.
More heavy equipment reached the hardest-hit city of Mamuju and the neighboring district of Majene on the island of Sulawesi, where the quake affected Friday night, said Raditya Jati, a spokeswoman for the National Mitigation Agency. of Disasters.
Power supply and telephone communications also began to improve.
Thousands were left homeless and more than 800 have been injured, more than half still receiving treatment for serious injuries, Jati said. A total of 47 people died in Mamuju and nine in Majene.
Jati said at least 415 houses in Majene were damaged and about 15,000 people were taken to shelters. The agency is still collecting data from the area.
Mamuju, the provincial capital of about 300,000 people, was littered with rubble from collapsed buildings. The governor’s office building was nearly flattened by the quake and a mall reduced to a crumpled hull. Two hospitals were damaged.
The disaster agency said the army corps of engineers cleared the road connecting Mamuju and Majene which was blocked by landslides. They also rebuilt a damaged bridge,
Many on the island of Sulawesi are still being chased by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that devastated the city of Palu in 2018 and caused a tsunami that caused the earth to collapse in a phenomenon called liquefaction. More than 4,000 people died, many of them buried when whole neighborhoods were swallowed up on the falling ground.
Indonesia, home to more than 260 million people, is often affected by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis due to its location in the “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific basin.
A magnitude 9.1 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.