Earthquake hits Indonesia killing 4 as restaurant collapses

“The residents were really panicked. I was in a car and it felt like the wheels of the car were lifted,” said Tri Asih, a resident of Jayapura, the capital of Papua.

Officials said four people who were inside a floating restaurant died when the earthquake caused it to collapse into the sea.

“The bodies of the four victims have been found,” National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Abdul Muhari told a news conference. “The victims were trapped under the rubble of the cafe and covered by the roof.”

Rescue divers searched the area around the cafeteria for any survivors.

Muhari said houses, buildings and medical facilities were also damaged. Some patients from the city hospital were evacuated to its courtyard.

A series of strong earthquakes have rocked Papua since January. The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said it recorded 1,079 earthquakes in the city of Jayapura and its surroundings since January 2, 132 of which were strong enough to be felt by residents.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago home to more than 270 million people, is frequently hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the “Ring of Fire”, an arc of seismic faults around the basin. of the Pacific.

A magnitude 5.6 earthquake on November 21 killed at least 331 people in West Java. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since an earthquake and tsunami in Sulawesi in 2018 killed around 4,340 people.

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.