Sunil Jagtiani, Jakarta – A powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Tuesday, killing at least 70 people, flattening buildings and sparking panic in the streets of Malaysia and Singapore.
Officials said the death toll was expected to rise in the latest catastrophe to hit the beleaguered nation, and hospitals were quickly overwhelmed with the rush of wounded. Many people were feared to be trapped under rubble.
Communication was cut off with much of the area close to the epicentre of the 6.3-magnitude quake so there was no immediate way of knowing the extent of the damage there, they said.
But elsewhere doctors were forced to set up shop outdoors, running drips for the injured and working in hastily erected tents. Television showed staff at the main hospital in Padang city scrambling in chaos to cope with the wounded.
"So far 70 people were reported dead in various places and scores injured," said Sudi Silalahi, a spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
He said the president may go to the disaster site and had ordered police, military, local authorities and government ministers to coordinate to do all they could to bring relief to the stricken areas.
Officials said many people had broken bones and open wounds, and some had suffered head injuries.
"There are hundreds of victims," the mayor of Solok, a rice-farming area of about 50,000 people close to the epicentre, told ElShinta radio. "We have asked for medical help," said the mayor, Samsurahim, who goes by one name. "Our facilities here are insufficient."
The quake struck at 10:49 am (0349 GMT), the US Geological Survey said, 49 kilometres (30 miles) northeast of Padang, the capital of West Sumatra.
Many people were trapped in collapsed buildings and there was no official information about the situation at the quake's epicentre because phone lines were down, Utjin Sudiana, West Sumatra's police chief, told AFP.
"The epicentre is in Batusangkar but communication is disconnected from there so we don't know what the damage is," he said. The town is about 50 kilometres from Padang.
The devastating 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.
Indonesia, an archipelago of some 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 some 168,000 people in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra.
Some 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.