
Hanoi (VNA) – An earthquake with a preliminarymagnitude of 6.2 was recorded near Flores Island, southern Indonesia, the USGeological Survey (USGS) said on October 2.
The quake, which hit about 250 km southwest of Ende onFlores, was later revised down by the USGS to 5.9 magnitudes. There were noimmediate tsunami alerts or reports of casualties or damage.
It happened four days after the country’s Central Sulawesiprovince was ravaged by two devastating quakes measuring 6.1 and 7.5 on theRichter scale. The second was followed by giant tsunami waves of up to 6 metreshigh in some areas.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination ofHumanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) estimated some 190,000 Indonesian citizens inCentral Sulawesi are in need of humanitarian aid. Among them, there are 46,000children and 14,000 elderly victims.
The Indonesian government is making concerted efforts to bring food, aid andnecessities to Sulawesi, while rescuers race against time to find victimstrapped inside the debris.
As of October 1, the disasters have racked up a total ofnearly 1,300 deaths and the casualties are believed to keep rising.
No Vietnamese has been reported dead or missing,according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It also confirmed that 10Vietnamese students studying at Tadulako University in Palu city are safe.
These are the latest natural disasters to hit Indonesia, which is frequentlystruck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its locationon the "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in thePacific Basin.
A series of earthquakes in July and August killed nearly 500 people on theholiday island of Lombok, hundreds of kilometres southwest of Sulawesi.
In December 2004, a massive 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the northernIndonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Oceancountries, killing 220,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 168,000in Indonesia.–VNA