The sea pulled back first. In Nagekeo, the area closest to the epicentre, residents saw the water retreat on Saturday morning and ran for higher ground. Behind them, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake off Flores island had already brought down buildings.
By the afternoon of August 15, at least 38 people were dead. Fathur Rahman, a rescue official, said six were injured and two remained trapped across four towns. The U.S. Geological Survey put the quake at 5.58 am local time, at a depth of 10 km, 68 km north-northwest of Ende city in East Nusa Tenggara province.
Landslides and cut roads
Much of the toll came from the ground giving way. Suharyanto, head of the National Disaster Management Agency, said 16 bodies were pulled from a landslide in Reok village in Manggarai. Slides in Ende regency also cut the Trans-Flores highway, the roughly 700-km mountain road that runs from Labuan Bajo to Larantuka. East Nusa Tenggara Police Chief Rudi Darmoko said power cuts and communication failures were slowing the count of damage and casualties.
In Maumere, resident Lukas Lotar said patients ran out of a hospital as the shaking started. “I saw some walls were cracked,” he said. Yohanna Embu, a Sikka resident, said the waiting room at the Maumere port terminal had collapsed. At St Peter Major Seminary in Sikka, a roof collapsed over an assembly hall during morning Mass; the rector, the Rev Guidelbertus Tanga, said at least one priest broke a leg jumping from a second-floor window.
About 2,000 villagers in Nagekeo moved into temporary shelters, Suharyanto said. Three helicopters and a rescue vessel were deployed.
Tsunami warning, then relief
Indonesia’s meteorology agency, BMKG, first warned of tsunami waves in parts of East Nusa Tenggara, West Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi and Southeast Sulawesi. It later lifted the alert after finding no significant sea-level change. “We have ended (the tsunami warning) but we will keep monitoring the sea level,” said Wijayanto, the agency’s earthquake and tsunami director. Dozens of aftershocks followed, the strongest at magnitude 6.1, and people were told to stay out of damaged buildings.
A familiar threat
Indonesia lies along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, a belt of volcanoes and fault lines around the Pacific Basin, and Flores has been hit before. A 7.7-magnitude quake in 1992 set off a tsunami that killed around 2,500 people on the island. In 2018, a magnitude 7.5 quake near Palu killed more than 4,400 people, with liquefaction turning whole neighbourhoods to sludge. The 2004 Indian Ocean quake and tsunami killed around 220,000 people across the region, about 170,000 of them in Indonesia, according to AFP.
Sources
- Powerful 7.7-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Off Indonesia’s Flores Island, Killing 38 and Triggering Mass Evacuations
- Indonesia Earthquake: Powerful 7.7 Magnitude Quake Strikes Flores, Kills At Least 38; Tsunami Warning Later Lifted | VIDEO
