mother earth speaks yesterday and again todayOfficial: Indonesia quake buries thousands
7.6-magnitude temblor kills at least 75 on the island of Sumatra
BREAKING NEWS
msnbc.com news services
updated 2 hours, 11 minutes ago
PADANG, Indonesia - At least 75 people have been killed and thousands more trapped under flattened buildings in a powerful earthquake off Sumatra island on Wednesday, Indonesian officials said.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla announced the death toll at a news conference, hours after the 7.6-magnitude quake hit off the coast of the town of Padang on Wednesday.
Thousands of people were trapped under collapsed buildings, said Rustam Pakaya, head of the Health Ministry's crisis center. A field hospital was being prepared to assist the injured, he added.
The quake, which was along the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered a landslide that cut off land transport to the area closest to the epicenter, officials said. Power and telecommunications were also cut.
Earlier, a series of tsunamis smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa and Tonga, killing at least 99 people, some of whom were washed out to sea, and destroying villages and injuring hundreds. Those tsunamis were generated by an earthquake with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3.
'Extreme panic'
The quake was felt around the region, with some high-rise buildings in the city state of Singapore, 275 miles to the northeast, evacuating their staff. Office buildings also shook in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center canceled an earlier tsunami warning. Japan said no tsunami was expected there.
"Hundreds of houses have been damaged along the road. There are some fires, bridges are cut and there is extreme panic here maybe because water pipes are broken and there is flooding in the streets," said a Reuters witness in the city.
Padang sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.
A 9.1 magnitude quake, with its epicenter roughly 373 miles northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami which killed 232,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and other countries across the Indian Ocean.
The depth of Wednesday's earthquake was measured at 53 miles, the USGS said.
A city under constant threat
Geologists have long said Padang, with a population of 900,000, may one day be destroyed by a huge earthquake because of its location.
"Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake," said Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute, in February.
"The entire city could drown" in a tsunami triggered by such a quake, he warned.
Several earthquake-prone parts of the country hold tsunami practice drills, and the national disaster service sends alerts via telephone text messages to subscribers.
But some experts have long said Indonesia needs to do more to reduce the risk of catastrophe.
Padang needed to invest in better infrastructure, including more roads and other escape routes, said Hugh Goyder, a consultant for the United Nations' International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, earlier in the year.
"The road goes parallel to the coast, which means it's difficult in some areas to get away from the coast," Goyder said, adding that in one part of the city, the only escape route is a narrow bridge.
Sumatra is home to some of the country's largest oil fields as well as its oldest and smallest liquefied natural gas terminal, although there were no immediate reports of damage to those facilities.
Please check back for details on this breaking news story.
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Wed Sep 30, 2009 12:03 pm
