Strong earthquake hits Indonesia’s main island Java
A forceful earthquake rocked part of Indonesia’s main island on Saturday, raising intense panic and sending people running into the streets.
There were no immediate reports of casualties on Java and officials said there was no danger of a tsunami.
The strong quake was measured at magnitude 5.7 by the US Geological Survey. Its centre was about 18 kilometres (11 miles) southeast of Banjar, a city between West Java and Central Java provinces, at a depth of 112 kilometres (70 miles).
It comes almost two weeks after a magnitude 5.6 earthquake killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in West Java’s Cianjur city.
The 21 November quake was the deadliest in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi which killed about 4,340 people.
About 377 people were injured in the November quake, authorities confirmed in an Instagram post, adding that over 7,000 people were displaced.
Dwikorita Karnawati, head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency, said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of possible aftershocks.
The agency put a preliminary magnitude at 6.4 and it was later lowered to 5.7. Variations in early measurements are common.
High-rise buildings in Jakarta, the capital, swayed for more than 10 seconds and some ordered evacuations, sending streams of people into the streets. Even two-story homes shook in central Java’s cities Kulon Progo, Bantul, Kebumen and Cilacap.
Earthquakes occur frequently across the sprawling archipelago nation, but it is uncommon for them to be felt in Jakarta.
The country of more than 270 million people is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire”.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
With additional reporting from the Associated Press
