Indonesia: Magnitude 6.3 earthquake rocks Lombok island

A strong earthquake jolted the Indonesian island of Lombok, causing landslides on Mount Rinjani and damaging buildings, as it tries to recover from a quake earlier this month that killed hundreds of people.

The US Geological Survey measured Sunday’s quake, which was centred in the northeast of the tourist island, at magnitude 6.3 with a depth of 7 kilometres.

It was felt on the neighbouring island of Bali and was preceded a few minutes earlier by a magnitude 5.4 quake, also in Lombok’s northeast, residents said.

“I was driving to deliver aid to evacuees when suddenly the electricity pole was swaying. I realised it was an earthquake,” East Lombok resident Agus Salim told AFP news agency.

“People started to scream and cry. They all ran to the street,” Salim added.

An Associated Press reporter on Lombok said the tremor caused landslides on the slopes of Rinjani and panic in villages.

Video shot by the Indonesian Red Cross showed huge clouds of dust billowing from the mountain’s slopes.

The shaking toppled motorcycles and there was damage to buildings in Sembalun subdistrict, including a community hall that collapsed.

The hall had sustained damage in earlier quakes, said National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. Homes and a mosque were also damaged, he said.

He said so far there have been no reports of injuries or fatalities, but information was still being collected.

Al Jazeera’s Scott Heidler, reporting form the Indonesian capital Jakarta, said that many residents of the area were still psychologically recovering from previous earthquakes.

“Where this earthquake struck today, there had also been a weaker earthquake at the end of last month… so they were rattled to begin with and with this new one they are even more so,” he said. 

Mount Rinjani has been closed to visitors following a July earthquake that killed 16 people, triggered landslides and stranded hundreds of tourists on the mountain, an active volcano.

A magnitude 7.0 quake that struck Lombok on August 5 killed 460 people, damaged tens of thousands of homes and displaced several hundred thousand people.

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago that straddles the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

In 2004, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.3 undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, in western Indonesia, killed 220,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies