Batam City Send 16 Volunteers To Mentawai

Batam (ANTARA News) - Sixteen volunteers of Batam City's Mercy Mission Relief would be deployed in the tsunami-hit district of Mentawai in West Sumatra Province to help refugees.

Among the volunteers were doctors, paramedics, and trauma counselors, Head of Batam City's Mercy Mission Relief Irwan Widjaja said here Monday.

"All the volunteers are from Batam, Tanjungpinang, and Tanjungbalai Karimun. They also bring three tons of humanitarian aids to be distributed to the needy," he said.

The humanitarian aid packages consisted of medicines, used clothes, blankets, baby's supplementary milk and staple foods," he said.

"We have prepared the staple foods in Padang (the capital of West Sumatra Province-eds.).

All humanitarian aid packages were collected from and donated by the Bethel Indonesia Church's congregation and business community members in Batam City, Irwan Widjaja said.

The 16 humanitarian workers of Batam City's Mercy Mission Relief would firstly go to Sikakap Island to help the tsunami disaster victims in Pagai Utara and Pagai Selatan areas.

To anticipate the harsh sea waves, the volunteers would rent a copper to reach the targeted areas. They would also set up a radio communication post to back up the aid distribution mission, he said.

The Mentawai mission was his team's fifth humanitarian mission after the previous natural disasters in Aceh, Yogyakarta, Nias, and West Sumatra over the past six years.

The deadly giant waves that killed several hundreds of Mentawai district's residents was triggered by the October 25's strong earthquake.

The magnitude of the Mentawai earthquake was 7.2 in the Richter Scale.

Seismologists believed that it was triggered by friction of two active plates of Indoaustralia and Eurasia which extends along West Sumatra coastal waters.

Soon after the powerful earthquake, two other aftershocks hit the same area later.

The epicenter of the the magnitude 7.2 earthquake was 78 km west of Pagai Selatan subdistrict, Mentawai district, at a depth of 10 km.

The tsunami killed at least 449 people and caused 96 others to go missing. The giant waves also wounded 212 people; seventy of them got serious injuries.
(ANT-028/R013/HAJM/Btm1)