Indonesia earthquake: rescuers search for survivors

**Oliver Conway** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Sunday, the 16th of August. Almost 50 people have been confirmed dead after a powerful earthquake hit Indonesia. Israel carries out its deadliest strikes in southern Lebanon for months. And Moroccan police stop hundreds of migrants breaking into Ceuta, two weeks after tens of thousands rushed into the Spanish territory.

**Janek Ondrej** (0:29)
Also, in this podcast, the good news is, as it is a dorsal fin, so it didn't enter into a muscle. We saw her hunting, depredating, feeding.

**Oliver Conway** (0:38)
An orca known among the boat-sinking community survives a pellet gun attack. On Saturday morning, Indonesia was hit by a powerful earthquake.
Buildings collapsed and people ran for safety as the 7.7 quake rocked the island of Flores. At least 47 people died, but the number is expected to rise as rescuers continue to pick through the rubble. Many survivors spent the night in evacuation camps while the injured are being treated in hospital.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:14)
The wound on my head is getting better, but my leg still hurts. It was broken when the house collapsed on me.
It was 6 in the morning. I was taking a shower and getting ready for work when the earthquake suddenly struck. My grandchild was outside, so I ran to save them. I shielded my grandchild under my stomach and I was the one who was hit when the house collapsed.

**Oliver Conway** (1:39)
A tsunami warning was issued but lifted around 3 hours later. Aftershocks included a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in North Sumatra.
BBC Indonesia's Astu Destra Arjun Rastri told us about the ongoing rescue operation.

**Astu Destra Arjun Rastri** (1:55)
The local government has now been deploying their own local rescue teams and the national agency from Jakarta is now also deploying their resources to help with the local government. The search and evacuation process is still ongoing because several people are still stuck under the rubbles. But at the same time, it is also the government also increasingly focused on providing emergency shelters and aid like clean water and food. About 2000 residents are now still evacuating independently. So the plan is for the government now to provide a more coordinated help for those people.

**Oliver Conway** (2:39)
And we heard more from our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head.

**Jonathan Head** (2:43)
In this area, Flores, there aren't any big high rise buildings, large buildings. I mean, Malmari, which is the largest town in Flores, is quite close to the epicenter. There's only about 300,000 people, but people who were outside or in public buildings, it's a Catholic part of Indonesia. So if there were people at mass in the morning, I mean, some of them were injured when roof tiles or roofs caved in. And people just rushed out because they know about earthquakes. The first thing was to get out of buildings. Buildings are not always very strong there. We've seen videos of public buildings not quite collapsing, but large chunks of concrete coming down. We saw videos from the port in Malmari where a large ferry was docked taking on passengers. People on the gangway there were thrown into the sea when the whole thing collapsed into the water. And a lot of people got on motorbikes and started heading inland. And that's because there were tsunami warnings at 7.7. This was a very powerful earthquake in the sea to the north of Flores and people there have a strong collective memory of a catastrophic earthquake back in 1992 where more than 2,000 people died almost entirely because of a tsunami, a very high one. In this case, it didn't happen and that probably minimized loss of life. But as things stand, it was felt very widely all over Flores, lots of small towns, it's a very mountainous area.
So it's taking Indonesia's very experienced search and rescue team some time to reach all the communities where buildings have collapsed and where they may be trapped people. There have been landslides on the roads, the roads are not very good anyway. So a lot of places are cut off and it's proving quite difficult both to reach those areas and to make a full assessment of exactly how bad the damage is. But it looks, it's not catastrophic, but it's pretty bad. This is a very poor region and a lot of buildings are quite badly damaged, a lot of houses are uninhabitable.

**Oliver Conway** (4:35)
Our South East Asia correspondent Jonathan Het.
Israel has carried out its deadliest strikes in Lebanon for months, killing 11 people. The Israeli government said it was targeting the Iran-backed group Hezbollah and argued the attack should help rather than hinder peace talks with Lebanon. Doran Spielman is the Israeli Prime Minister's spokesman.