9/13/2007
PADANG : A powerful earthquake shook western Indonesia for the second straight day Thursday, collapsing buildings in a coastal city and triggering tsunami alerts. The morning jolt was felt in Malaysia and Singapore, where tall buildings swayed.
Rafael Abreu, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said the magnitude-7.8 quake did not appear to be an aftershock to Wednesday's 8.4-magnitude temblor.
It was centered 185 kilometers southeast of Padang in Sumatra, the island ravaged by the 2004 tsunami disaster that killed an estimated 230,000 people in a dozen nations, the USGS said, at a depth of just 10 kilometers.
Thousands of frightened people piled into trucks or sought shelter on higher ground as the ground trembled from aftershocks.
"Many buildings collapsed after this morning's quake," Padang Mayor Fauzi Bahar told Elshinta radio after officials issued, lifted and then reissued a local tsunami alert. "We're still trying to find out about victims."
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii warned Thursday's quake had the potential to generate destructive waves within 1,000 kilometers of the epicenter. It advised authorities to take immediate action to evacuate coastal areas.
On Wednesday, a strong earthquake shook Southeast Asia, collapsing buildings, killing at least five people and injuring dozens in Indonesia. Nations as far away as Africa put coastal areas on alert after that jolt, but only a small, nondestructive tsunami hit Sumatra.
Most damage Wednesday appeared to come from the ground-shaking of the temblor.
"Everyone is running out of their houses in every direction," Wati Said reported by cell phone from Bengkulu, a Sumatran town 130 kilometers from the quake's epicenter. "Everyone is afraid."
One witness, Budi Darmawan, said a three-story building near his office fell.
"I saw it with my own eyes," he told El Shinta radio.
Two people died when a car dealership collapsed in Padang and another was killed by a fire that broke out on the fourth floor of a damaged department store, a witness, Alfin, said by phone. Excavation machinery was being used to search the rubble for survivors, he said.
The Health Ministry said two people died in Bengkulu, hundreds of kilometers away. At least 194 people were injured on Wednesday, reported Amin Kurnia, a doctor who said most were being treated in a compound outside the hospital because its walls were cracked.
Sensitive to the 2004 tsunami disaster, governments issued alerts as far away as Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa, telling people to leave beaches. People in Mombasa, Kenya, crowded into buses after hearing the warning over the radio.
Thailand's National Disaster Warning Center sent cell phone text messages alerting hundreds of officials in six southern provinces, and authorities also were told to prepare in India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Sri Lankans were told to move at least 200 meters inland.
In Australia, the tsunami warning was lifted after only small rises in the sea level were measured at Cocos Island and the Christmas Islands. A new alert was issued after Thursday's quake, with the Bureau of Meteorology saying there could be unusual waves and currents.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
The magnitude-9 earthquake that hit on Dec. 26, 2004, triggered a tsunami off the coast of Sumatra that killed or left missing an estimated 160,000 Indonesians, most of them in Aceh province.
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