A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the coast of Flores Island in eastern Indonesia early Saturday, collapsing buildings, triggering landslides and prompting a tsunami warning that sent coastal residents fleeing to higher ground.
The quake hit at 5:58am local time (21:58 GMT Friday), with its epicentre roughly 68 kilometres north-northwest of the city of Ende in East Nusa Tenggara province, according to the United States Geological Survey. USGS put the depth at just 10 kilometres, a shallow rupture that tends to produce stronger shaking at the surface. Three aftershocks followed within half an hour, measuring magnitudes 5.9, 5.6 and 6.1.
Rising death toll and a race to reach the epicentre
Casualty figures climbed through the day as rescue teams reached affected towns. Around the port town of Maumere, rescuers found 20 people dead, six injured and two trapped under rubble, said Fathur Rahman, head of the local search and rescue agency, in comments carried by Reuters and AFP.
“"From the reports we have received, 20 people have died, six are injured, and two are still buried," Fathur said, speaking by telephone from a boat on his way to Nagekeo regency, the area closest to the epicentre.”
Teams had yet to reach Nagekeo itself by Saturday afternoon, as communications signals there had been disrupted, Fathur told Reuters. Indonesia's national disaster mitigation agency, BNPB, said roughly 2,000 residents in Nagekeo had evacuated, with damage reported to houses, warehouses and government buildings. Landslides had also cut off several roads, complicating the rescue operation.
One Nagekeo resident, 56-year-old Yohanes Babo, described the moment the ground began to move while he was at a local market. "The shaking was strong. Thankfully, we were already outside the house," he told AFP.
A tsunami scare, then relief
Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, known as BMKG, issued a tsunami warning covering parts of East Nusa Tenggara, West Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi and Southeast Sulawesi provinces, urging people to stay away from beaches and riverbanks. In Nagekeo, AFP journalists reported that the sea appeared to retreat, a phenomenon often taken as a warning sign of an approaching tsunami, sending residents racing for higher ground.
The warning was lifted roughly three hours later after monitoring showed no significant sea-level changes that posed a threat to coastal communities, according to BMKG. Authorities nonetheless warned residents against returning to damaged buildings, citing the risk that aftershocks could bring already weakened structures down.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", the arc of fault lines and volcanoes that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin, making the archipelago one of the world's most earthquake-prone nations. Flores itself has a grim precedent: a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in 1992 triggered a tsunami that killed around 2,500 people on the island. Indonesia's deadliest recent disaster remains the magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra in 2004, which set off a tsunami that killed roughly 220,000 people across the region.
For European readers, the scale of Saturday's quake is roughly comparable to the strongest earthquakes recorded in the Mediterranean basin in the past century, though Indonesia's position on multiple tectonic plate boundaries makes such events far more frequent there than in Europe. Flores is also a popular destination for European tourists, drawn to nearby Komodo National Park, and diplomatic missions were monitoring the situation for any nationals affected, though no reports of foreign casualties had emerged by Saturday afternoon.
Rescue efforts were continuing as of Saturday evening local time, with officials warning that the death toll could rise further once teams reach Nagekeo and other isolated areas near the epicentre.
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