Indonesia earthquake causes heavy losses among children

Like most other children across Indonesia, 4-year-old Dewi Hani usually spent her afternoons studying at an Islamic school. She was learning to write the Arabic alphabet in a notebook she kept inside her blue backpack, along with a pencil and Quran.

Monday afternoon was no different — until the moment a 5.6-magnitude earthquake flattened buildings in the area. Hani was one of five students killed when her two-storey Islamic school collapsed in a village a few dozen miles from Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

Hani’s mother, Ning Dida, 34, rushed to the school and saw the second floor sitting on the floor. The first floor – where her daughter was studying – has disappeared.

“I suddenly felt weak,” Ms. Ning said Thursday in Sarambad village. “I heard voices calling ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’ but I didn’t recognize any of them.”

The official death toll from the quake, which hit a mountainous area on the country’s main island of Java, stood at 272 as of Thursday. This may be much less. Officials say it is already clear about a third of the dead were children, many of whom were trapped in collapsed homes or schools.

The extent of the structural failures has drawn attention to what experts say is a persistent problem in Indonesia: a stark disparity between the quality of construction in urban and rural areas.

Although Indonesia has building codes, “they are difficult to enforce, and there is a lack of oversight and enforcement by the government, especially in rural areas,” said Elisa Sutanugaja, executive director of the Rojak Center for Urban Studies, a research group. institute in Jakarta.

hotspots of disasters

Earthquakes large and small occur almost every day in Indonesia, a country of about 270 million people that lies at the meeting point of many tectonic plates and along an arc of volcanoes and fault lines. The devastation caused by powerful earthquakes has been compounded by landslides caused by deforestation, small-scale mining and urban development.

“It’s only going to get worse, because climate change is going to make it worse,” said Benjamin P. Horton, director of the Earth Observatory in Singapore.

Large earthquakes have added urgency to efforts to raise construction quality across Indonesia to standards aimed at making homes and other buildings earthquake-resistant without collapsing. But recent earthquakes have exposed a wide gap between urban and rural building standards.

In one example, the destruction of buildings after an earthquake on Lombok island in 2018 was mainly attributed to “design inconsistencies,” including non-compliance with structural reinforcement rules, according to a July study of Indonesian building codes.

Government offices, hotels and other large buildings, especially in Jakarta, have been upgraded and will be very safe during earthquakes, said Keri Syah, a seismologist who has studied Indonesia.

But he said one- or two-story buildings are more common around the country outside of cities. Many are built with little rebar and poor quality concrete, and they tend to collapse when shaken by earthquakes.

Indonesia’s national building codes are mostly adapted from New Zealand and United States codes. Municipalities are required to pass their own laws, along with disaster risk assessments and spatial planning regulations.

Only about 30 percent of them have produced their own building codes, Sutanugaga said, and many have codes they can’t enforce due to lack of funding and staff, or geographic challenges. She added that in rural areas, many homes are built by occupants, and the quality of construction depends on their socio-economic status.

“Often, even in a big city like Jakarta, the planning document is not aligned with the risk assessment,” she said. “So, basically, many settlements are already hotbeds of the next natural disaster, such as earthquakes.”

God did not save her.

The earthquake that struck Java on Monday concentrated its force on Cianjur Regency, an agricultural region south of Jakarta.

If the brick and concrete structure where Hani died had been funded by the government, the contractor would have had to comply with national building codes, according to Ms. Sutanugaga. Since it was privately funded, it instead had to comply with local laws that were implemented in 2013.

Kumariya, an official of a district within the district who goes by one name only, said many people in the district build on mountainous terrain and cannot afford the materials that would make their structures safer.

Hani Islamic School, better known as the Madrasa, has gone through three phases of construction, according to Muhammad Yusuf Subryatna, a volunteer teacher whose family owns the school. In 1997, it was built as a single-story structure measuring 13 by 30 feet. In 2006, he said, it increased its dimensions to 20 by 41 feet. And in 2016, a second story was added, funded by a $7,000 donation from a Middle Eastern investor.

“We built this school ourselves with the help of the neighbours,” he said. “We don’t have a building permit, but I consulted with a friend who’s an expert in construction.”

For a quarter of a century, the school has withstood earthquakes without showing any crack. But the one that struck on Monday afternoon toppled the second story, killing Hani and three other girls, ages 6, 7 and 12, as well as a 10-year-old boy. Three other children were injured.

Her mother, Mrs. Ning, said during an emotional interview that Hani was a quiet and obedient child who was learning how to write numbers and recognize letters of the alphabet. Her favorite doll was Hello Kitty, and she loved eating rice with salt and soy sauce.

When Hanyi left the house on Monday, Mrs. Ning was busy frying potatoes for her husband, who is a peddler. I stopped to help the girl close her black dress and arrange her veil, and give her about 13 cents of her pocket money.

When the earthquake occurred, Mrs. Ning and her husband focused on helping an elderly neighbor. But minutes later, her husband started shouting: Hani, where is Hani?

They run to Hani’s school and panic when they see that her second haircut has collapsed. Other children were crawling through a small hole in the rubble. A teacher told them not to worry.

Mrs. Ning called out Hanyi’s name for an hour, but the girl did not appear. Eventually, officials brought the couple to a nearby evacuation tent where they would be safer from aftershocks.

She said, “I was continuing to pray in the tent, asking God to save her.” “But God did not save her.”

Hani’s body was discovered around 12:30 am, and buried nine hours later in a white shroud, an Islamic funeral custom.

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