Thaindian News

Jakarta, Sep 2 (DPA) At least 25 people were killed and dozens injured Wednesday when a 7.3-magnitude earthquake rocked Indonesia’s Java Island, officials said.
The quake was felt strongly in the capital Jakarta, shaking buildings and sending residents running out of their homes and high-rise office towers in panic.

A tsunami alert was cancelled about 45 minutes later after no giant waves materialised.

“The quake left large cracks in my apartment walls. I’m traumatised,” said Yuni Wahidah, who lives in an apartment building in central Jakarta.

The quake triggered a landslide in a village in the West Java district of Cianjur, killing at least 12 people, said Panji Maulana, an official at the National Agency for Disaster Management.

The other 13 fatalities were from Sukabumi, Garut and Tasikmalaya districts, both in West Java, he said.

Panji said he expected the death toll would rise.

“We have problems communicating with the affected areas because of power blackouts,” he said.

Indonesia’s state-run Antara news agency reported that 57 people were buried alive in Cianjur after a hill collapsed and hit a number of houses.

Rescue workers, using traditional equipments and lighting with torches were continuing their search for the missing people who were buried under house debris, the report said.

Earlier, the disaster management agency’s spokesman Priyadi Kardono said 10 office buildings collapsed in the West Java capital of Bandung but there were no reports of fatalities.

More than 5,000 people sought refuge at government offices in Cianjur because they were too afraid to return home or their houses were damaged, Priyadi said.

Six teams were being sent to the hardest-hit areas to provide emergency relief, the officials said.

Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry’s crisis centre, said as many as 112 people were hospitalised with injuries in Jakarta, where the tremor cracked some buildings and shattered windows.

The quake struck at 2.55 p.m. (0755 GMT) with its epicentre in the Indian Ocean, 142 km southwest of Tasikmalaya, 30 km beneath the seabed.

The US Geological Survey put the quake’s magnitude at 7.4 but later revised it to 7.0.

Reports from several West Java cities and district towns said the powerful quake also cut electricity and telephone lines.

“All the people here panicked. I saw roofs falling down,” Lia Amalia, a visitor at a shopping mall in Bogor, about 60-km south of Jakarta, told detik.com online news service.

An 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck the southern coast of west Java in July 2006, killing more than 600 people and leaving tens of thousands of others homeless.

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation, sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, which is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity because continental plates meet there.

A major earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck in December 2004, leaving more than 170,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia’s Aceh province and half a million people homeless.