5.7 quake damages over 100 houses in Indonesia

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake hit near the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Friday, the United States Geological Survey said, damaging more than 100 houses with no reports of casualties.

The tremor hit at 02:52 am local time (1952 GMT Thursday) at a depth of 68 kilometres, with the epicentre offshore near Bengkulu province, according to the USGS.

The country’s meteorological agency gave a higher magnitude of 6.0 with the epicentre at a depth of 84 kilometres, adding that there was no potential for a tsunami.

The tremor damaged more than 100 houses and at least six public facilities in the provincial capital of Bengkulu city, Abdul Muhari, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, or BNPB, said in a press conference on Friday.

“In Bengkulu city, 140 houses were affected (by the quake), eight of which collapsed, meaning (they) cannot be repaired,” Abdul said.

In the Central Bengkulu district, two houses were lightly damaged due to the quake, he added.

Abdul said no casualties from the quake were reported as of Friday morning.

Some locals in Bengkulu were woken up by the jolt and immediately rushed outside.

“During the quake... (my) house’s window shook strongly. That was what woke us up,” Erick Catur Nugroho, 36, told AFP.

“We spontaneously (carried) the children outside the house. When outside, all the neighbours that I saw were not in their house, (they were) in front of the doors.”

The vast archipelago nation experiences frequent earthquakes due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of intense seismic activity where tectonic plates collide that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

A magnitude-6.2 quake that shook Sulawesi in January 2021 killed more than 100 people and left thousands homeless.

In 2018, a magnitude-7.5 quake and subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi killed more than 2,200 people.

And in 2004, a magnitude-9.1 quake struck Aceh province causing a tsunami.

The undersea megathrust earthquake, known by the scientific community as the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, was caused by a rupture along the fault between the Burma plate and the Indian plate, and reached a Mercalli intensity of IX in some areas.

Agencies