The dead included very young children and the elderly. Mohammad Jafar, 60, said his daughter, granddaughter and grandson died within the earthquake, but he had come to terms with it, considering it “God’s will.”
He was preparing for morning prayers when the earthquake occurred. He said he and his wife managed to get through the rubble. Another man said he found his 9-year-old daughter alive against a cracked wall in a neighbor’s house.
Thousands of persons are homeless or afraid to return to their homes. Authorities in Aceh say greater than 8,000 people spent the night alone in shelters within the Pidie Jaya district.
Deadly earthquakes often occur within the region, and lots of people live with the terrifying memory of the large earthquake that occurred on December 26, 2004 off the coast of Sumatra. The 9.1-magnitude quake triggered a devastating tsunami that killed over 100,000 Aceh residents.
The Indonesian government said the emergency aid included 10 generators, tents, foldable beds, baby items and body bags.
The army creates a field emergency hospital and sends twenty doctors, and the Ministry of Health sends a medical team and sends medicines. The Red Cross sent aid in the shape of water trucks on Wednesday, and the humanitarian group CARE is leading an assessment team of 4 international aid groups to avoid duplication of efforts. Aid groups and others are also appealing for donations.
“Every aid organization and civil society is stockpiling in the area as many boxes of rice, instant noodles, blankets and other aid as they can transport,” said Paul Dillon, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, which has an assessment team in northern Aceh.
He added that it can take no less than two more days before we have now a more complete picture of the number of individuals displaced and the help required. IOM said on Twitter that one mosque provided shelter for two,000 displaced women and kids.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake occurred about 19 kilometers southeast of Sigli, a town near the northern tip of Sumatra, at a depth of 17 kilometers. It didn’t cause a tsunami. By 9 a.m. Thursday, about 36 aftershocks had hit the realm.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is vulnerable to earthquakes as a result of its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines within the Pacific Basin. The 2004 quake and tsunami killed a complete of 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Aceh.
John Ebel, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Boston College, said there’s a risk that even weak aftershocks could cause further damage to buildings, especially since modern constructing codes will not be consistently enforced in Indonesia.
Dozens of rescuers and giant excavators worked on the ruins of a market in Meureudu, the hardest-hit town, where many shops collapsed.
The owner of one in every of the shops, Hajj Yusri Abdullah, had little hope of finding any survivors. He said that just about two dozen bodies had been pulled from the rubble of the market the day before. They included a gaggle of eight, consisting of the newlywed couple and members of the family, who participated in an ornate ceremony generally known as Antar Dara Baro.
The country’s disaster agency said nearly 600 buildings were severely damaged or destroyed in Pidie Jaya, Pidie and Bireun districts. Most of them were shops or apartments, but mosques, a hospital, boarding houses and a shopping center also suffered damage. Roads also broke and power poles fell.
This article appeared within the print edition of the South China Morning Post as: Aid groups reach Aceh earthquake zone as death toll reaches 100
