At least 70 people were killed on Tuesday when a strong earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra, toppling buildings and sparking panic in the streets of nearby Malaysia and Singapore.
CNN reported that hundreds of buildings had collapsed on the island.
Local officials said hospitals were quickly overwhelmed and appealed for urgent help after the 6,3-magnitude quake, whose epicentre was on the island. It appeared to have been followed by an aftershock almost as strong.
Officials in Solok, a rice-farming city of about 50 000 people close to the epicentre, said an unknown number of buildings had collapsed.
”Most died because of collapsed buildings,” Gusmal, an official in the city of Solok, told the detikcom news website. The official Antara news agency said many buildings were damaged and that the death toll was expected to rise.
”Several houses have collapsed. There are hundreds of victims,” Solok mayor Samsurahim, who goes by one name, told ElShinta radio, adding that a school had been burnt to the ground after the quake.
”We have asked for medical help,” he said. ”Our facilities here are insufficient.”
He said at least 65 people had been wounded and that four had been taken to hospital with broken bones, open wounds and head injuries.
The catastrophic Asian tsunami in 2004 was set off by a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, and Tuesday’s quake sparked a panic on the Indonesian island and across the region.
In Singapore, which is rarely hit by quakes, hundreds of people cleared out of their office skyscrapers and raced into the streets — some of them weeping and screaming — when the ground started to tremble.
”We grabbed our bags and just evacuated,” office worker Nicholas Wong told local radio. ”Everyone was panicking. One of my colleagues was crying because she had never felt such an effect before.”
But there were no reports of any damage in the city-state or in Malaysia, where the quake was also felt.
The quake struck at 10.49am local time, the United States Geological Survey said, 49km north-east of the West Sumatra capital, Padang. Indonesian seismologists estimated a lower magnitude of 5,8.
Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17 000 islands, sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where continental plates meet — and where earthquakes are a regular and often deadly occurrence.
Indonesia was the nation worst hit by the earthquake-triggered Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, which killed about 168 000 people in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra.
About 5 800 people were killed and 33 000 others injured in a massive quake that rocked Java island in May last year. Two months later, another quake on Java killed more than 600.