A strong earthquake shakes the main island of Indonesia; no tsunami warning

A magnitude 5.6 earthquake on November 21 killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in the city of Cianjur in West Java. It is the deadliest quake in Indonesia since the 2018 earthquake and tsunami in Sulawesi that killed an estimated 4,340 people.

Dwikorita Karnawati, head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of possible aftershocks.

The agency put a preliminary magnitude at 6.4. Variations in the opening bars are common.

Skyscrapers in Jakarta, the capital, swayed for more than 10 seconds and some ordered evacuations, sending streams of people onto the streets. Even two-storey houses shook in the towns of Kulon Progo, Bantul, Kebumen and Cilacap in central Java.

Earthquakes occur frequently in the huge archipelago nation, but they are rarely felt in Jakarta.

The country of more than 270 million people is frequently hit by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis due to its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific basin known as the from “Ring of Fire”.

In 2004, an extremely powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh.