More than 70,000 people have been left homeless in the deadly earthquake that hit Lombok island, forced to sleep in makeshift shelters and lacking food, medicine and clean water, authorities said Wednesday.
The shallow 6.9-magnitude quake killed at least 105 people and triggered panic among locals and tourists on Lombok on Sunday, just a week after another tremor surged through the holiday island and killed 17.
Some 236 people have been severely injured in the latest quake, with tens of thousands of homes damaged, and authorities have appealed for more medical personnel and basic supplies.
“The efforts to evacuate people have been intensified but there are still a lot of problems on the ground,” national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said Wednesday.
The number of victims keep rising. More than 70,000 people have been evacuated and tens of thousands of houses have collapsed.”
There are fears the death toll will rise as workers with heavy machinery claw through the rubble of homes, schools and mosques, with hopes of finding any survivors fading.
Muhammad Zainul Majdi, the governor of West Nusa Tenggara province which covers Lombok, said there was a dire need for medical staff, food and medicine in the worst-hit areas.
Hundreds of bloodied and bandaged victims have been treated outside damaged hospitals in the main city of Mataram and other badly affected areas.
“We have limited human resources. Some paramedics have to be at the shelters, some need to be mobile,” Majdi told AFP.
Across much of the island, once-bustling villages have been turned into virtual ghost towns.
“In some villages we visited the destruction was almost 100 percent, all houses collapsed, roads are cracked and bridges were broken,” said Arifin Muhammad Hadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian Red Cross. (AFP)
