Hope fades in Indonesia school collapse

Jakarta [Indonesia], October 3: Indonesian rescue workers on Thursday began using heavy equipment to remove rubble from a collapsed Islamic boarding school after advanced detection devices no longer picked up signs of life, the country's disaster agency said. The decision marked a shift from painstaking manual searches that had been carried out since the four-storey prayer hall of the Al Khoziny boarding school in East Java's Sidoarjo district caved in during afternoon prayers on Monday. Rescue workers pulled five people alive on Wednesday, but nearly 60 others, most aged between 13 and 18, remained unaccounted for, the National Disaster Management Agency said. Two bodies recovered on Wednesday brought the confirmed death toll to five. Rescuers had deployed thermal drones and other sensors to detect life beneath tons of concrete, bricks and twisted iron rods, agency chief Suharyanto said. "We sterilized the site and made it completely quiet so that if there were any signs of life, our equipment could pick it up," Suharyanto told reporters. "But there were none."(dpa)
Source: Qatar Tribune