Earthquakes rock East Java, damaging buildings

9/10/2007

JAKARTA : A pair of moderate earthquakes rocked an Indonesian town early Monday, damaging buildings and causing panicked residents to flee their homes, an official and witnesses said. There were some reports of injuries.

The temblors with preliminary magnitudes of 4.5 and 4.9 struck Situbondo, 800 kilometers east of Jakarta, said Suhardjono, a meteorologist at the government's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency.

"We have reports there was damage because the tremor's epicenter is so shallow at about 10 kilometers beneath the earth," said Suhardjono.

"The television set was shaking and (the quakes) caused some cracks in the neighbors' homes," said Hariyono, who was awakened in the middle of the night by the first quake and ran outside with her children.

Witnesses told local media some buildings had collapsed and that several people had suffered broken bones, but those reports could not immediately be verified.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.