Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of dangers from aftershocks. The agency put the quake’s preliminary magnitude at 7.4. Variations in early measurements are common.
The quake was followed by aftershocks of magnitude 5.4 and 5.6 that hit the Bali Sea a few minutes later, just before dawn.
Panic grips affected region
Many residents and tourists rushed out of their homes and hotels toward higher ground after reporting powerful shockwaves, but the situation returned to normal after they received text messages saying the quake had no potential to trigger a tsunami.
“I thought the walls were going to come down on the hotel,” an Australian tourist said on social media. People in the neighbouring provinces of East Java, Central Java, West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara also felt the tremors and panicked as houses and buildings swayed for several seconds.
Why Indonesia is so prone to natural disasters?
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 270 million people, is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific.
An earthquake in the hilly Karangasem in 2021 triggered landslides and cut off at least three villages, killing at least three people.
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake last year killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in West Java’s Cianjur city. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed about 4,340 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 2,30,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
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