Strong quake hits west Indonesia; at least 1 dead

A powerful earthquake jolted the western Indonesian island of Sumatra early Tuesday, killing a 12-year-old boy and sending people streaming from houses, hotels and at least one hospital in panic.
The magnitude-6.6 quake was centered 60 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of the city of Medan and 62 miles (110 kilometers) beneath the earth's crust, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
It was too far inland to generate a tsunami.
The quake hit at about 1 a.m. (1800 GMT Monday), rattling people from their sleep in towns and villages across the island's northern tip.
Maura Sakti, a mayor in Subulussalam, told local station TVOne a 12-year-old boy had been killed. At least one other person was injured.
Hundreds of people were evacuated to temporary shelters as authorities surveyed the extent of the damage, said Lt. Col. Helmy Kesuma, police chief in the hard-hit town of Singkil.
Some electricity poles were knocked down there, crashing into homes and causing blackouts.
"My wife was screaming, my children crying," said Burhan Mardiansyah, 37, a Singkil resident. "We saw our walls start to crack and everything inside the house was falling. Thank God we're all safe."
The panic extended all the way to Medan, the sprawling provincial capital of North Sumatra, where hundreds of patients from at least one hospital had to be evacuated, some in wheelchairs or with infusion drips still attached to their arms.
Hotels emptied out and residents ran into the streets or the balconies of their rented homes, clutching babies to their chests.
Fearing aftershocks, many refused to go back inside for hours.
Indonesia straddles a series of fault lines that makes the vast island nation prone to volcanic and seismic activity.
A giant quake off the country on Dec. 26, 2004, triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 230,000 people, half of them in Indonesia's westernmost province of Aceh.

Another Big 6.7 Magnitude earthquake strikes off Indonesia

Hundreds of residents fled an Indonesian port town for higher ground on Monday when an earthquake struck south of Java with a magnitude estimated by US seismologists at 6.7.
The epicentre in the Indian Ocean was 24 kilometres (15 miles) miles deep, the US Geological Survey said, after initially estimating it at 10 kilometres underground, and 277 kilometres south of the Javanese coast.
Indonesian seismologists put the magnitude at 7.1 and issued a tsunami warning, saying the tremor had the potential to cause a killer wave and asking recipients of its public alert SMS to warn others of the danger.
The warning was later cancelled.
When the quake struck hundreds of residents in the seaport town of Cilacap fled inland and to higher ground by motorbike, car and on foot, an AFP reporter said.
"They were all panicking and shouting 'quake, quake'," the reporter said.
Suharjono, the technical head of Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said shaking from the tremor had been felt in Pangandaran and Cilacap districts in Java.
"This quake roused people from their sleep," he said. "We have not received any reports of damage or casualties so far."
The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre had said that there was no risk of a widespread destructive wave, but there was a "very small possibility of a local tsunami".
The earthquake epicentre was 241 kilometres from the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island, and seismologists said the tremor was felt there, but no tsunami warning alert was issued for Australia.
"We had reports from there that they felt it," Geoscience Australia seismologist David Jepson told AFP, adding that it was described as a "moderate type quake".
Geoscience Australia put the quake at 6.7 magnitude.