JAKARTA: An earthquake of magnitude 7.4 struck in the Northern Molucca Sea off Indonesia’s Ternate island on Thursday, damaging some buildings and triggering tsunami waves, authorities and witnesses said.
The US Geological Survey reported aftershocks of magnitude as high as 5, and Indonesia’s meteorology agency BMKG reported tsunami waves in West Halmahera at 0.3m high and Bitung at 0.2m high.
Indonesian broadcaster Metro TV reported one person had died from falling rubble in Manado, North Sulawesi province, and video showed damaged buildings.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said issued a tsunami alert but lifted it two hours later after the threat passed.
“Based on all available data... the tsunami threat from this earthquake has now passed,” the agency said in a statement.
Local media reported damage to buildings in North Sulawesi province, but have reported only one death so far. Indonesian authorities said the victim was killed when caused a building collapsed in Manado,
“The quake was felt strongly and around Manado... one person died and one person had a leg injury,” official George Leo Mercy Randang told AFP by telephone. The victim was “buried under the rubble” of a collapsed building, he said.
A Manado resident said that people ran out of their houses in panic. There was no visible damage in her neighborhood, but items fell off shelves and power had been cut.
The shaking persisted for “quite long” but he did not witness “significant damage,” he added.
Indonesia straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
USGS illustration map showing the approximate location where the earthquake struck off Ternate, Indonesia. (USGS)
Regional governments in some cities, such as on Ternate and Tidore, the historic Spice Islands, were urged to prepare citizens for evacuation.
Hazardous tsunamis were possible along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia within 1,000 km (620 miles) of the epicenter, US tsunami warning authorities said.
The epicenter of the quake was roughly 580 km south of the Philippine coast and 1,000 km from Malaysia’s Sabah.
The Philippines’ seismology agency Phivolcs said there was “no destructive tsunami threat” to the country based on latest data.
Malaysia’s meteorological department said in a Facebook post there was no tsunami threat to Malaysia at the moment and that it was monitoring developments
Waves of heights ranging from 0.3 m to 1 m (0.98 ft to 3.28 ft) above the tide level could hit some coastal areas of Indonesia, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.
It also warned of the risk of waves less than 0.3 m (1 ft) over tide levels for the coasts of Guam, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Taiwan.
Japan may see waves of up to 0.2 m (8 inches), but no damage is expected, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, as it warned a tsunami could occur in the Pacific.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, sits on major seismic faults and is frequently hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
In 2022, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake at least 602 people in West Java’s Cianjur city, the deadliest one in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
(Wth Reuters, AFP and AP)
