A strong earthquake struck Indonesia’s Sumbawa island early yesterday, killing at least one person and injuring around 80 after damaging homes, schools and mosques, a police official said.
The US Geological Survey said the epicenter of the 6.7-magnitude quake was 15km north-northwest of Raba, Sumbawa, at a depth of 18km.
There was no tsunami warning issued after the quake, which struck at 3:41am.
Tjatur Aprianto, the police chief in Bima, a town in Sumbawa near the epicenter, said six people had been badly injured with three in a coma and one who later died.
The official said 72 people had suffered minor injuries, while authorities were still compiling damage estimates.
“Residential houses, school buildings, mosques have been damaged, but not all of the buildings are totally destroyed, part of them have collapsed,” Aprianto said.
An official from Indonesia’s meteorology agency earlier said there had been reports of panic in Mataram, the capital of the nearby Lombok, where a strong tremor was felt.
Meanwhile, torrential rains triggered a series of landslides on Sulawesi, killing at least 14 residents and burying many more, a local official said yesterday.
The downpours sent a mass of mud slamming into about 20 houses in the outskirts of the town of Palopo, Mayor Pateddungi Tenri Ajeng said.
Rescuers pulled 14 victims from under the earth and debris that hit one neighborhood overnight on Sunday, he said. Police, soldiers and villagers continued to search for an unknown number of people still missing.
Several other landslides cut off access to the town, Tenri Ajeng said, but those slides were not believed to have caused damage or fatalities.
Several days of flooding cut off villages and submerged more than 3,600 houses in the area, local media reported, forcing people to seek higher ground.
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