Quake rocks Indonesian capital

A powerful earthquake shook Indonesia’s capital today, rattling tall buildings and panicking residents, the US geological survey and witnesses said.

The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 and struck 180 miles beneath the sea, the agency said.

Residents said tall buildings and single storey homes in the capital, 66 miles from the epicentre, were shaking violently.

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

A massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on December 26, 2004, killed more than 131,000 people in Indonesia’s Aceh province and left half a million homeless.

The undersea earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.5 and was centred 66 miles east of Jakarta at a depth of around 180 miles, said the US Geological Survey.

Because of the quake’s depth, there was little risk of a tsunami, said Robert Cessaro, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.

The quake on December 26, 2004 that triggered the tsunami off the coast of Sumatra and killed more than 131,000 in Indonesia’s Aceh province was just 18 miles in depth, according to the USGS.

“Because this earthquake was so far below the ocean bottom, it didn’t trigger a tsunami or cause a lot of damage,” said John Bellini, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Centre.

“The earthquake centre in 2004 was close enough that it actually ruptured the surface of the sea floor, which caused a tsunami. This one was felt by people on the ground, and it shook buildings, but it was too deep to cause the ocean bottom to move.”