A powerful 7.7-magnitude quake that struck east Indonesia early on Aug 15 killed two people, an emergency services official said as the extent of the damage unfolded.
“At this point there are two reported fatalities”, a man and a woman, disaster agency spokesman Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan told reporters in Jakarta.
“Once the data are confirmed, we will officially announce the final number of casualties and the extent of damage to buildings caused by the earthquake,” he said.
According to the US Geological Survey, the epicentre of the quake was located off the north coast of the island, about 68km north-west of Ende.
Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) recorded the first quake at 4.58am at a depth of 15km, followed by several aftershocks.
The initial jolt was followed by strong aftershocks in the same area, including one with a magnitude of 6.1.
The national disaster agency had earlier called for evacuations.
Abdul Muhari, an official at the national disaster agency, BNPB, said: “We strongly urge our communities along the northern coast of Flores and in the southern parts, on the southern islands and across the southern region, to carry out self-evacuation immediately.”
Residents should “move away from the shore, either by going more than 2km inland or by moving up into hilly areas more than 10m high”, he told local broadcaster Kompas TV.
Many rushed from their homes, but there were no initial reports of damage from the quake, which was felt strongly for around one minute in regions such as Nagekeo and Bima, said Dodi Yuleova, the spokesperson for the national disaster mitigation agency.
“Suddenly it started to shake and I panicked,” 31-year-old hospital customer service official, Lukas Lotar, told AFP. “Patients also fled the hospital, the jolt was big. I saw some walls were cracked.”
A video on Facebook, verified by Reuters as located at a port in Maumere, the main town in Sikka Regency on Flores Island in eastern Indonesia, showed parts of a building collapsing in dust and rubble as people screamed and ran in the street.
A hospital in the district of Ende in East Nusa Tenggara Province was moving patients outside, Kompas TV footage showed.
The Indonesia geophysics agency lifted its tsunami warning at 8.42am, local time.
It had earlier warned there was a possibility of tsunami waves being generated by the quake, with an alert issued for waves ranging from 0.5m to 3m.
Residents in the town of Maumere on Flores Island, about 2,400km away, were evacuating to higher ground, an AFP correspondent saw.
He said the sea in the area could be seen receding, a common phenomenon ahead of a possible tsunami.
Images broadcast on Indonesian television showed hundreds of people in nearby Nagekeo regency evacuating the area, as well as damaged buildings.
Separately, Australia’s tsunami warning centre said the undersea earthquake will have “no tsunami threat to the Australian mainland, islands or territories”.
Indonesia and neighbouring countries experience frequent earthquakes due to their location in the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through South-east Asia and across the Pacific basin.
Among Indonesia’s history of deadly quakes is a devastating 9.1-magnitude tremor in 2004 that struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, including about 170,000 in Indonesia.
The Boxing Day tragedy was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
In 2018, a powerful quake shook the island of Lombok and several more tremors followed over the next couple of weeks, killing more than 550 people on the holiday island and neighbouring Sumbawa.
Later that year, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people dead or missing.
Source: AFP, REUTERS
--Agencies
