Indonesia tsunami, quake kills 384 – video

Rescuers scrambled to reach tsunami-hit central Indonesia on Saturday, after a strong quake brought down several buildings and sent locals fleeing their homes for higher ground.

The aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Indonesia on Friday. Image: Twitter/@bdnews24

The shallow 7.5 magnitude tremor was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and August.

The tsunami waves, triggered by the latest quake, reached a maximum height of 1.5 metres, the disaster agency said, with video footage showing a churning wall of water slamming into Palu city on Sulawesi Island.

https://youtu.be/XQ_78iYGNw4

According to Sky News, 384 people are now confirmed dead.

Dramatic video footage filmed from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre, showed waves of water bring down several buildings and inundate a large mosque.

Map of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where an 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck Friday. | © AFP | AFP

People living hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre reported feeling the massive shake, hours after a smaller jolt killed at least one person in the same part of the Southeast Asian archipelago.

The quake hit just off central Sulawesi at a depth of 10 kilometres just before 6:00 pm local time (1100 GMT), the US Geological Survey said. Such shallow quakes tend to be more destructive.

“There are reports that many buildings collapsed in the earthquake,” national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement.

The massive shake came hours after a smaller jolt killed at least one person in the same part of the country | © BNPB/AFP | Handout

“Residents panicked and scattered out of their homes.”

Pictures supplied by the agency showed a badly damaged shopping mall in Palu where at least one floor had collapsed onto the storey below, while other photographs showed major damage to buildings and large cracks across pavements.

Search and rescue teams have been dispatched to hard-hit areas, Nugroho said.

Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth, as it lies on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide and many of the world’s volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.

– AFP