Office workers were forced to flee-high rise buildings in the capital while hundreds of people ran down the streets of downtown Jakarta when the quake struck.
Local TV showed patients being evacuated from a hospital in the capital.
Rudy Togatorop, 35, who works at the Chilean embassy, said: "We felt the earthquake for three to five minutes.
"I was just sitting down, then I felt the building swaying. The emergency stairs were very narrow. I was worried if something would happen."
At least 130 buildings have been damaged by the quake and at least eight children have been injured, six of them seriously.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia's disaster agency, said in a statement: "In Cianjur, six students were seriously injured and two students suffered light injuries when the (school) roof collapsed.”
The strong earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia's Java island, with shaking felt across the capital Jakarta.
Residents have explained how buildings “swayed” as the earthquake hit the Indonesian capital.
People took to Twitter to give their account of the quake that “lasted around 20 seconds”.
Footage from Twitter user William Gallo shows crowds of people gathered outside buildings after the earthquake hit central Jakarta.
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JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong earthquake struck off the southern coast of Java, Indonesia, on Tuesday, rocking buildings in the capital, Jakarta, and sending people fleeing into the streets in panic.
The magnitude-6.1 earthquake struck around 1:34 p.m. about 100 miles southwest of Jakarta, with its epicenter in the Indian Ocean. There were no immediate reports of casualties, but reports on social media suggested that buildings in the capital shook for several seconds, with some being evacuated.
Around Jakarta, panicky Indonesians fled schools, office buildings and other high-rises.
“It felt like a giant rock had dropped either in the hallway or just outside the building,” said Marcoen Stoop, a Belgian businessman who lives on the 35th floor of an apartment building in Jakarta. “Then, the building started swaying and the swaying increased steadily,” he added, saying the rocking lasted less than a minute.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, straddles the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” and is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
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Hesti Dimalia, 27, a local newspaper journalist, said she hid under a table in her eighth-floor newsroom in South Jakarta after the temblor struck, then ran down an emergency stairwell to the street after building security instructed everyone to evacuate.
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“I was afraid, afraid I was going to die,” she said. “I remembered my little kid at home. That’s why I was shouting, ‘Allahu akbar,’ so he would protect me,” she said, referring to the Arabic phrase “God is great.”
Kaprawi, a duty officer with the Regional Disaster Management Agency in Banten Province, which lies in the West Java region, said that as of Tuesday afternoon, 105 homes had been damaged, a vast majority of them lightly, although a small number were flattened.
A 6.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Indonesia’s Java island, forcing evacuation of office and residential buildings in Jakarta and its suburbs.
The epicenter of the quake was near Lebak in Banten province at a depth of 10 kilometers, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said on Twitter. There were no immediate reports of any loss of lives from the impact of the quake, which initially measured 6.4 on the Richter scale, the agency said. The temblor was relatively shallow and triggered no aftershocks, it said.
More than 100 buildings were damaged on the outskirts of Jakarta, Kompas TV reported, citing Kaprawi, Banten head of the nation’s disaster mitigation agency.
Indonesia’s 17,000 islands are especially prone to earthquakes because the country straddles the Ring of Fire, an arc of fault lines and volcanoes that causes frequent seismic upheavals. Waves unleashed in 2004 by the undersea earthquake off the Sumatran coast caused the deadliest natural disaster this century, taking more than 220,000 lives and leaving more than 1.5 million homeless.
“We were immediately evacuated once the earthquake happened,” said Josua Pardede, chief economist at Bank Permata, who worked at the 28th floor of a building in Jakarta’s main Sudirman business district.
The impact of the midday quake was also felt in Bogor, Bandung, and several cities in central Java and Sumatra, the agency said. Trading at the Indonesia Stock Exchange was unaffected by the temblor, Rheza Andhika, a spokesman said in a text message. The benchmark Jakarta Composite Index traded near a record 6,565.310 by 2:31 p.m. local time.
— With assistance by Tassia Sipahutar, and Harry Suhartono
