At least 384 people are dead after a series of deadly earthquakes struck Indonesia Friday, the biggest triggering a tsunami that roared ashore and swept away parts of the Southeast Asia nation.
According to the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), the disaster started whena 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck the city of Palu— flattening buildings and leaving its residents, estimated to be more than 380,000 people, seeking shelter.
Soon thereafter, a tsunami with an estimated height of 16 feet came crashing into the island, BNPB said. It swept away homes, malls, churches, hotels, businesses and bridges and knocked out the electrical supply, causing complete darkness throughout the city as the evening came.
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BNPB spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said that officials are trying to determine the exact number of victims in Palu, but that at384 people had been killed as of Saturday morning, with 540 people injured and at least 29 still missing,The New York Timesreported.
Aftershock earthquakes continued Saturday morning, BNPB added.
Palu’s residents were in preparation for a beach festival at the time.
The water reached as high as 20 feet in some places. “We got a report over the phone saying that there was a guy who climbed a tree up to 6 meters high,” Nugroho said, CBS News reported.
Dwikorita Karnawati, the chief of the meteorology and geophysics agency, told Reuters that the situation was “chaotic” after the tsunami. “People are running on the streets and buildings collapsed,” he said. “There is a ship washed ashore.”
Nugroho later tweeted amateur cell phone video taken of the deadly wave arriving on shore, clearing the landscape in seconds and leaving residents screaming for help. He also shared before and after photos of the Ponulele bridge, its golden arches previously “an icon of Palu City.”
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The closest airport to Palu’s was also taken out in the quake, the runway cracked and control tower damaged, AirNav Indonesia — which oversees aircraft navigation — said.
One of its air traffic controllers, Anthonius Gunawan Agung, had stayed behind to ensure a flight he’d cleared for departure took off. After it did, he jumped from the tower, thinking it was falling, and died, officials said. He was 21.“We felt a deep heartbreak, may God gives Anthonius the best place beside him, along with other victims of Donggala earthquake,” AirNav spokesperson Yohanes Sirait said on Twitter.
“We already have people en route but you never know what damage there is to the road infrastructure,” Jan Gelfand, head of the International Red Cross in Indonesia, told CNN. “It is not just the people in the large urban areas. There are a lot of people also living in remote communities who are hard to reach.”
Indonesia is home to 260 million people across more than 17,000 islands.
The area is located on an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire,” making it susceptible to earthquakes, volcanos and tsunamis.
Last month,a trio of earthquakes killed more than 505 people in Lombok, the Associated Press reported.
source: people.com
