Brick homes without mortar worsened disaster

BAWURAN, Indonesia – His village is a huge pile of rubble today, and for Sopo Nyono the reason seems simple: bricks without mortar.

For years, people in this part of Java built their houses by piling bricks on top of each other with only layers of dirt between them. There was no mortar or reinforcing bars, just a coating of cement to keep the stack from toppling over.

When a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck central Java on Saturday, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these buildings turned into tombs. Searchers said the quake claimed a disproportionately large number of poor victims because they had been the ones most likely to live in the cheap, mortarless houses.

Of 2,000 people who lived in Bawuran, 54 were killed and 375 were injured, said Nyono. At least half the homes in the village, including his, had been built all or in part without mortar and collapsed.

Cahyo Alkandana, a documentary filmmaker and president of an association of cave explorers who was coordinating the volunteer search of the village of Bawuran, said quality of construction was a key factor in the deaths.

“Poor people were more likely to die,” he said. “The high number of people killed is because of the quality of the houses. The good, new buildings did not collapse, but this model is going to collapse because it’s cheap.”