By Johan Purnomo and Stanley Widianto
SIDOARJO, Indonesia (Reuters) -Rescuers were racing against time on Thursday to extricate some 60 teenagers trapped under the remains of an Islamic boarding school that collapsed earlier this week due to foundation failure, disaster authorities said.
The Al Khoziny school, located in the East Java town of Sidoarjo some 480 miles east from the capital Jakarta, collapsed when its foundations could not support ongoing construction work on the upper floors, cratering upon dozens of students who were praying and trapping them under rubble.
Abdul Muhari, spokesperson with the disaster mitigation agency, said in a statement on Thursday that 59 people remained trapped under the rubble, based on the school’s list of absence and missing person reports filed by families.
Rescuers are still assessing on Thursday whether there are signs of life by calling out the names of the victims, having found no such signs late on Wednesday, search and rescue agency official Nanang Sigit told Reuters.
He added that the assessment will be used to determine further evacuation efforts.
In signature orange uniform, rescuers crawled through narrow tunnels to find students trapped under rubble, according to photos distributed by the country’s search and rescue agency.
Late on Wednesday, Yudhi Bramantyo, operations director at the agency, said the total death toll from the collapse had reached six, although the country’s disaster mitigation agency said on Thursday it was still at five.
“We can’t let our minds wander. Maybe there is still hope for our little brothers,” Bramantyo said.
An excavator and a crane were on-site to help rescuers shift the debris, but disaster officials ruled out their use for fear it could set off a wider collapse.
Al Khoziny is an Islamic school known locally as a pesantren.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has a total of about 42,000 pesantren, serving 7 million students, according to data from the country’s religious affairs ministry.
(Reporting by Johan Purnomo in Sidoarjo and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta; Editing by David Stanway)
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