Indonesia hit by two strong earthquakes in one day as death toll rises to 47

LAST UPDATE | 3 hrs ago

A SECOND EARTHQUAKE has struck Indonesia today after at least 47 people were killed in a separate earthquake.

Rescuers combed through debris looking for survivors after the first powerful earthquake, magnitude 7.7, struck off Flores island in eastern Indonesia, killing at least 40 people and sending thousands fleeing.

Later in the day, another earthquake, magnitude 6.9, was recorded thousands of kilometres away on Sumatra island in the west of the archipelago. However, there were no initial reports of damage or casualties there.

Rescue official Fathur Rahman said the death toll from the Flores island quake had risen to 47 by Saturday evening, with 50 people injured.

Two people were known to be trapped alive under rubble in the neighbouring Manggarai regency after the 7.7-magnitude jolt.

“Our focus will be on locating the victims who are buried under the rubble” said Fathur Rahman, a rescue official.

Nearly 160 houses, dozens of educational and health facilities and other public buildings were damaged when the earthquake struck the popular tourist island in Indonesia’s east, the national disaster management agency, the BNPB, reported.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said preparations were underway to bring aid to some 2,000 people in temporary shelters.

The government sent 50,000 aid packages weighing a total of 275 tonnes to the area, and European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen offered help from the bloc’s Copernicus Earth observation satellites.

“Europe stands ready to deploy Copernicus, our eyes in the sky, to support search and rescue efforts. Indonesia, we stand with you,” she wrote on X.

Dozens of houses and other buildings were damaged when the 7.7-magnitude quake hit the popular tourist island in Indonesia’s east.

Suharyanto said about 2,000 people had evacuated.

The rescue effort had been complicated by landslides cutting off several roads.

Residents in Nagekeo, the area closest to the epicentre, raced for higher ground as the sea retreated earlier Saturday – a possible sign of an approaching tsunami, AFP journalists witnessed.

A tsunami warning was later lifted but people were warned not to return to damaged buildings for fear that aftershocks may bring them down.

Dozens of aftershocks have been felt, the strongest measured at a magnitude of 6.1.

‘It felt like we were on a trampoline’

“I have never felt an earthquake this big,” Yulian Juita Ekalia, who lives in Ruteng city more than 100 kilometres west of the epicentre, told AFP by telephone.

“It felt like we were on a trampoline; it was really scary,” said the 37-year-old university lecturer, who jolted awake at around 5.30am local time.

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“As I rushed to get outside, everything in the house fell down: the television, my son’s trophies, the dish racks, suitcases on top of the wardrobes. When I got outside, my son and neighbours were already there, screaming in fear.”

‘My family is safe’ 

Yohanes Babo, 56, a resident of Nagekeo, said he was at a market when the earth started shaking in the early morning hours.

“The shaking was strong. Thankfully, we were already outside the house,” he told AFP.

“People were panicking, running here and there. We’re evacuating for the time being… and trying to get to the hills,” he said, adding: “My family is safe. No one was harmed.”

The epicentre of the shallow quake was located just off the north coast of the island, about 68 kilometres northwest of the coastal town of Ende, US and Indonesian authorities said.

Rescuers pull one dead body from the rubble of a building that partly collapsed at the port of Maumere.

Fathur said two people were evacuated alive from the debris and “one was found deceased”, according to video footage released by the agency.

The full extent of the damage is still being assessed.

Lukas Lotar, a resident of Maumere about 2,500 kilometres (1,553 miles) east of Jakarta, recounted how the earth “suddenly started to shake and I panicked”.

“Patients also fled the hospital, the jolt was big. I saw some walls were cracked,” Lotar, a hospital customer service official told AFP.

The stricken area is comprised mostly of towns and villages with few, if any, high-rise buildings.

Monitoring sea level 

Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) initially warned of possible tsunami waves following the quake and urged people to get to higher ground.

Long queues of people could be seen evacuating towns on foot, by motorbike and car, some piled into the back of pickup trucks.

“We have ended (the tsunami warning) but we will keep monitoring the sea level,” said BMKG earthquake and tsunami director Wijayanto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Indonesia and neighbouring countries experience frequent earthquakes due to their location in the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Flores was struck by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake in 1992, which triggered a tsunami and resulted in around 2,500 deaths.

Among Indonesia’s history of deadly quakes is a devastating 9.1-magnitude tremor in 2004 that struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, about 170,000 of them in Indonesia.

The Boxing Day tragedy was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

In 2018, a powerful quake shook the island of Lombok and several more tremors followed over the next couple of weeks, killing more than 550 people on the holiday island and neighbouring Sumbawa.

Later that year, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people dead or missing.