UPDATE: Fifth quake hits Indonesia in three days
Pastor Dale Morgan
UPDATE: Fifth quake hits Indonesia in three days*
* Story Highlights
* NEW: 6.4-magnitude quake strikes Sumatra, reports USGS
* 3 major quakes strike Sulawesi and Sumatra on Thursday
* Nine killed after 8.4 quake strikes southwestern coast of Sumatra
Wednesday
JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- A strong earthquake with a preliminary
magnitude of 6.4 struck Friday off the southwestern coast of Sumatra,
the same area shaken by a major 8.4-magnitude temblor that killed nine
people Wednesday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
A woman salvages items from her newly built house at Air Besi in North
Bengkulu Thursday.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was "a very small
possibility of a local tsunami" affecting coastal areas within about 100
km (62 miles) from the quake's epicenter.
The quake struck at 0601 GMT, 120 km (75 miles) west-southwest of
Sumatra's Bengkulu province and 650 km (405 miles) west-northwest of
Jakarta.
The Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics agency reported the epicenter
was located 10 km (6 miles) underwater 153 km (95 miles) west of Lais,
Bengkulu.
The region has been wracked by quakes and aftershocks for the past three
days.
On Thursday, a strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.2
struck Sulawesi. Another quake struck at 11:09 p.m. (12:09 p.m. ET), 110
kilometers (65 miles) west-northwest of Sumatra's Bengkulu province at a
depth of only 3 km (2 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Indonesian government issued, then canceled, a tsunami alert. There
were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
A quake with the same magnitude struck the region several hours earlier,
at 5:48 p.m. (6:48 a.m. ET). The temblor vibrated under the Celebes Sea
at a depth of about 21 km (13 miles).
It was centered about 290 km (180 miles) northeast of Bitung, a city on
the northern coast of Sulawesi, and the same distance south-southeast of
General Santos, Mindanao, Philippines.
Wednesday's quake generated a series of aftershocks, including two major
ones early Thursday measuring 7.8 and 8.1, said David Applegate, senior
science adviser at the U.S. Geological Survey.
"It's been an incredible number of years for Indonesia and particularly
for Sumatra" in terms of earthquakes, Applegate said on CNN's "American
Morning" on Thursday.
"What we have here is a subduction zone, where one of the Earth's plates
is moving down beneath the other," he said.
"In this case, the Indian Ocean and the Australian Plate are moving
beneath the Eurasian Plate.
"In this kind of a situation you're going to get earthquakes as the
strain builds up, but what we're seeing now is almost every segment of
this plate has ruptured just in the last several years," Applegate said.
"In each case, it relieves pressure in one area but then that increases
the pressure somewhere else. And so, for example, what we saw yesterday
was the magnitude 8.4 quake ruptured to the north along this boundary.
This 7.8 was at the northern end of that."
In the past 24 hours the region has been rocked by heavy seismic
activity -- with a total of at least 60 tremors rattling the country,
according to Indonesia's Social Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie.
The seismic shakedown began Wednesday night with a deadly 8.4-magnitude
quake -- centered in southern Sumatra, which is west northwest of Jakarta.
A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Thursday morning at about 6:45 a.m.
(7:45 p.m. Wednesday ET), USGS said. The epicenter was about 185 km
south-southeast of Padang and about 200 km northwest of Bengkulu.
About four hours later, the USGS reported that a 7.1-magnitude quake had
rocked the region. Sandwiched in-between were half a dozen temblors
measuring 5.0 and above.
At least 10 aftershocks of magnitude 5.1 to 6.0 were felt in the region
after the larger quake, which shook buildings hundreds of miles away,
killed at least nine people and generated a small tsunami about 60 cm
high along the Sumatran coast.
"Our main concern is the people," Bakrie said from Padang. "The victims
are not as dire as we thought and everything has been taken care of."
People in the Indian Ocean region have been extremely skittish about the
possibility of earthquake-induced tsunamis since December 2004, when
gigantic waves triggered by a 9.1-magnitude quake that killed more than
200,000 people in seven countries.
Wednesday evening's quake killed at least nine people in Bengkulu
province and Padang, and an unknown number were injured or missing,
according to officials. Search-and-rescue operations, suspended
overnight, resumed at daylight Thursday, which also marked the start of
the holy month of Ramadan in the mostly Muslim country.
The relatively light loss of life can be attributed to national and
provincial governments being battle-tested by a string of powerful
earthquakes over the last three years, Bakrie said.
"The people understand more about the problems and the danger of the
earthquakes," according to Bakrie. "The central government as well as
the district government, at the provincial level, has warned the people
... so the system works."
The powerful quake shook buildings about 385 miles away in the
Indonesian capital, Jakarta, and also in Singapore, about 435 miles from
the epicenter.
"Doors started to creak, and the whole apartment seemed to ... make a
cracking noise," said Rahayu Saraswati, who lives on the 35th floor of a
building in Jakarta. "We ran out to the emergency staircase with other
residents of the floor and ran all the way down to the lobby."
Bakrie said thousands of homes have been damaged in Sumatra.
Indonesia, a chain of islands in a seismically active area, is highly
prone to earthquakes. Since the devastating tsunami of December 2004,
Indonesia has fallen victim to 15 earthquakes with magnitudes of 6.3 or
higher, according to the USGS. The quakes have killed almost 8,000
people, with the bulk of the deaths coming last summer.
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The deadliest quake last summer came on May 26, 2006, when a
magnitude-6.3 quake 16 km south-southeast of Yogyakarta left 5,749 dead.
On July 17, 2006, a magnitude-7.7 temblor hit 145 miles south-southwest
of Tasikmalaya, in Indonesia's Java region. The quake killed 730 people.
Another devastating quake on March 28, 2005 -- a magnitude-8.7 about 201
km west-northwest of Sibolga -- killed 1,313 people.