A powerful undersea earthquake with a magnitude of 7.4 struck northern Indonesia on Thursday, causing buildings to collapse and prompting residents to flee. The quake resulted in at least one fatality and triggered a minor tsunami.
The tremor was notably felt in Bitung, located in North Sulawesi province, and in Ternate city in the adjacent North Maluku province, as reported by the Disaster Management Agency. The epicenter of the earthquake was in the Molucca Sea, which lies between these two provinces.
Preliminary reports indicated varying degrees of damage in Ternate, including a church and two homes. Meanwhile, damage assessments were still being conducted in Bitung, according to officials from the agency.
“We had just woken up when the earthquake struck… we all dashed out of the house,” recounted Marten Mandagi, a resident of Bitung. “The shaking was very intense,” he added.
In Manado city, North Sulawesi, a 70-year-old woman lost her life due to a building collapse, according to Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency. Another person sustained injuries in the same incident, while three individuals were hospitalized in Ternate.
Footage from the rescue agency depicted damaged buildings and flattened homes. Meanwhile, television broadcasts showed people hurriedly evacuating buildings and gathering in open spaces to avoid potential structural failures.
Dozens of aftershocks followed, including one of 6.2 magnitude. Authorities are continuing to gather information on damage and possible victims from multiple areas, particularly remote villages, as they work to assess the scope of the disaster.
Tsunami waves up to 75 centimeters (30 inches) above normal tides were recorded at several monitoring stations around the Molucca Sea coast. Indonesia’s meteorological agency lifted its tsunami warning hours after the quake, and the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said there was no destructive threat to the country, which is north of the quake’s epicenter.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, sits on major seismic faults and is frequently hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
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Associated Press writers Niniek Karmini and Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.
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