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One person has died after a serious earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia this morning.
The 7.4-magnitude quake within the Molucca Sea between the Sulawesi and Maluku island groups sent people fleeing from their homes as buildings were toppled by the strong shaking.
It triggered waves as much as two and a half feet high in places and prompted a tsunami warning that was subsequently lifted.
A 70-year-old was killed when a constructing collapsed in Manado, the region’s search and rescue chief George Leo Mercy Randang said, adding she was ‘buried under the rubble’.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I used to be just trying to save lots of my family,’ street food vendor Siti Rohayati, 58, said of the moment the quake hit through the breakfast rush in Manado in North Sulawesi province.
‘All that mattered was getting my children away safely. I pushed all three of them and told them “Run!”’
Budi Nurgianto, a 42-year-old resident of Ternate in North Maluku province, said he was inside his house when the tremor struck.
‘The quake was felt strongly. I heard it first from the partitions of the home that shook,’ he said.
‘Once I went outside, there have been many individuals outside. They were panicked. The quake was felt (for) quite long, greater than a minute.
‘I even saw some people leaving their house without having finished their shower.’
Indonesia is a tectonically complex a part of the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, a seismically energetic belt of volcanoes stretching from South America to the Russian Far East.
The epicentre of Thursday’s quake was roughly 360 miles south of the Philippine coast and 620 miles from Malaysia’s Sabah, and struck at a depth of twenty-two miles.
The USA Geological Survey said nine other quakes with a magnitude of seven or more have occurred inside 150 miles of Thursday’s event during the last 50 years but had not caused extensive damage.
Though the epicentre is inside 93 miles of densely-populated islands like Ternate and Sulawesi, USGS said there was a ‘low likelihood’ of further casualties, and economic damage was also expected to be limited.
Indonesia’s national disaster agency urged caution, saying: ‘Although relatively small, this case still requires vigilance attributable to the potential for aftershocks.’
It said initial reports were of minor to moderate damage to several houses and a church, and a fuller assessment was underway.
Abdul Muhari, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s disaster agency, urged residents to keep away from damaged buildings, warning that there have been still aftershocks.
Indonesia’s Metro TV showed video footage of damaged buildings and a Manado resident told Reuters people ran out of their houses in panic.
There was no visible damage in her neighbourhood, but items fell off shelves and power had been cut, the resident said.
The Philippines’ seismology agency Phivolcs said there was ‘no destructive tsunami threat’ to the country based on its latest data, while Malaysia’s meteorological department said there was no immediate tsunami threat to the country however it was monitoring developments.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre warned of the danger of waves lower than one foot over tide levels for the coasts of Guam, Japan, Malaysia, Papua Latest Guinea, the Philippines and Taiwan.
Japan may even see waves of as much as (8 inches, but no damage is predicted, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, because it warned a tsunami could occur within the Pacific.
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