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 when a 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.
BNPB spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said that officials are trying to determine the exact number of victims in Palu, but that at 384 people had been killed as of Saturday morning, with 540 people injured and at least 29 still missing, The New York Times reported.
The nearby city of Donggala, a fishing community, and the town of Mamuju were also hit by the massive wave, BNPB said in a release. The extent of the damage there and its death toll had not yet been determined as rescuer teams have not been able to reach the area due to damaged roads and crippled communication.
Aftershock earthquakes continued Saturday morning, BNPB added.
Palu’s residents were in preparation for a beach festival at the time.
“When the [tsunami] threat arose yesterday, people were still doing their activities on the beach and did not immediately run and they became victims,” Nugroho explained in a briefing in Jakarta, Reuters reported. “The tsunami didn’t come by itself, it dragged cars, logs, houses, it hit everything on land.”
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.”
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.
Rescue aid is still on the way to Palu, but with the airport shut down, relief workers have been forced to make their way to the city of Palu by road — a trip that can take around 10-12 hours, CNN reported.
“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.”
Meanwhile, residents have been surveying the rubble for victims. Hundreds of people are being treated in outdoor medical tents by hospital workers forced to flee the building.
“At the moment, in our hospital, electricity is out all over Palu, roads are cracked, the phone network doesn’t work,” Dr. Komang Adi Sujendra, director of Undata Hospital in Palu, said in a video posted on Twitter and translated by CNN. “We are hoping for any help. We need tents, medicine, canvas, nurses …”
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.
In December 2004, more than 230,000 people were killed from a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island in western Indonesia.
