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| The Lombok quake has already killed 91 people with fears the toll could rise (AFP Photo/ADEK BERRY) |
Mataram
(Indonesia) (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.
 |
Foreign
tourists were among those injured on Lombok and the nearby Gili
islands (AFP
Photo/ADEK BERRY)
|
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.
Infographic on the Indonesian holiday island of Lombok, where a 6.9-magnitude quake killed scores of people and damaged thousands of buildings https://t.co/PxrElscQ7A pic.twitter.com/a65Z8xV2qE— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 6, 2018
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