Three hurt in Indonesian earthquake
A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck under the sea of northeastern Indonesia today, damaging a church and injuring three people, the US Geological Survey and witnesses said.
It was large enough to cause a tsunami, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said in a statement, but there were no immediate reports of high waves in regional coastal areas.
The Indonesian seismological institute, which put the tremor at 6.7 magnitude, issued a tsunami alert via local television and radio after the earthquake hit around six miles under the Molucca Sea, the US Geological Survey said.
In the regional capital of Sulawesi, Manado, a witness said that residents ran in panic and that three people had been hurt after a church was damaged.
The epicentre was 80 miles from the city of Ternate, the capital of North Maluku province, where residents ran to higher ground in panic.
An official with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said that a basin-wide tsunami - one that travels a great distance or across an ocean - is not expected, though a tsunami near the earthquake's site is "always possible".
"Given the size of the earthquake, we think a basin-wide tsunami isn't likely, though a local tsunami could be possible," said Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at the tsunami centre.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire", an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
In December 2004, a massive earthquake struck off Indonesia's Sumatra island and triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people - 131,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province alone. A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.
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