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JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong earthquake struck off the southern coast of Java, Indonesia’s main island, on Tuesday, rocking buildings in the country’s 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. 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.
Six students at a vocational high school in West Java Province were seriously injured when tiles fell from the school’s roof, according to a statement released by Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia’s national disaster management agency. Two other students were slightly injured.
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As of Tuesday evening, there were no other official reports of injuries, and no fatalities had been reported.
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Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, straddles the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” and is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
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.
Indonesia's Metro TV showed patients being evacuated from a hospital in the capital while other footage showed petrified locals pointing up at skyscrapers in the capital shortly after the quake struck.
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.”
Besides schools, more than 130 houses and a mosque were damaged in the provinces of West Java and Banten.
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."
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.
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 about 60 kilometers, according to Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency. There were no 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.
Hundreds of buildings were damaged in western Java, most of them homes and health clinics, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency known as BNPB. Six high school students sustained major injuries in a roof collapse in Cianjur, West Java, while two others have minor injuries, he said.
“The numbers are likely to increase as there are more damaged buildings,” he said in a statement. “We call on the public to remain calm and not to fall prey to misleading rumors that larger aftershocks are about to happen.”
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.
Immediate Evacuation
“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 jumped 2.1 percent to a record closing high of 6,635.334.
— With assistance by Tassia Sipahutar, and Harry Suhartono
