Wednesday afternoon two earthquakes struck off the coast of Sumatra triggering tsunami evacuation warnings and reviving fear and panic from the earthquake and tsunami which ravaged South East Asia in 2004. Our dear friends from London where visiting so Tuesday morning we went surfing in Legion while the men bronzed and drank Bintang on the beach. After lunch and a bit of shopping in Seminyak we spent a wild night at the Sky Garden, a club with international djs and endless floors, I think we took about 3 hours just to make it to the balcony bar and dance floor at the top.
Wednesday after breakfast and kiss-filled goodbyes Michel, Theo and I took a well deserved nap. I was probably asleep (or reading NPR) when the earthquake hit, around 2 in the afternoon. I didn't feel a thing. The first quake, which was measured 8.6 by the United States Geological Survey, sent tremors though Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
In what ultimately amounted to a test of the region’s tsunami warning systems, residents in Sumatra fled coastal areas for higher ground. In Banda Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, the hurried, spontaneous evacuation came after several minutes of heavy shaking.
Thankfully there were no casualties or significant damage, and tsunami warnings were called off hours after they were broadcast on television, mobile phones and the Internet.
Wednesday’s earthquakes were further away then the 2004 quake and seismologists said the horizontal motion of the first quake made it less likely to trigger a tsunami. Bruce Pressgrave, a geophysicist, said the first earthquake was believed to have come from a “strike-slip fault,” which would reduce the likelihood of a destructive tsunami. The wall of such faults moves horizontally with little vertical motion, he told the BBC. “Since the motion is horizontal, it is not moving the water column, it is less likely to produce a destructive tsunami,” Mr. Pressgrave said.
On the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the closest Indian territory to the earthquake’s epicenter, officials and hotel managers said they felt the earth move at around 2:15 p.m., but said there was no sign of a tsunami or even big waves nearly two hours later. Bindu Prakash, an officer with the Indian Navy based on the islands, said there had been no noticeable rise in sea levels even past the estimated time that the tsunami was supposed to hit the islands.
