West News Wire: The tourist island of Bali and Indonesia’s main island of Java were both shaken by a big earthquake on Friday, creating panic but no initial reports of significant injuries or damage.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake had a center at a depth of 594 kilometers (369 miles), 96.5 kilometers (59.8 miles) north of Tuban, a coastal city in East Java province.
There was no tsunami threat, but Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency issued a warning about potential aftershocks. The agency assigned a 6.6 preliminary magnitude. Early measurements frequently differ.
Social media videos of locals and visitors in the nearby regions of Central Java, Yogyakarta, and Bali terrified as houses and structures shook for a number of seconds. Some places ordered evacuations, sending streams of people into the streets.
The country of more than 270 million people is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire.”
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
