Translated material
Waves of fear
Indonesia hit by tsunami again
The southern coast of the Indonesian island of Java was again hit by a tsunami. Despite the fact that the height of the wave was small - reliably no more than two meters, although some media reported a five-meter wave - it carried 60 people into the sea, and the death toll from the initially named five rose to twenty by the end of the day. According to the National Administration of Meteorology and Geophysics (NUMG) of Indonesia, the epicenter of the shock was in the Indian Ocean 220 km south of the town of Pangandaran (West Java province), and the source lay at a depth of 33 km. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake of magnitude 7.2, which occurred at approximately 12.19 Moscow time, and after the first shock there was another one of magnitude 6.1. Fleeing from the tsunami, thousands of people ran away from the beach, climbed trees and, as a TASS correspondent reports, rushed to mosques for help.Tremors were also felt in the country's capital, Jakarta, located several hundred kilometers from the epicenter. For obvious reasons, the ocean wave did not reach there. However, the earthquake caused real panic there too - mainly among those people who were in high-rise buildings at that moment.
But the problems of the Indonesian capital cannot be compared with the difficulties that the resort areas of the country affected by the tsunami are now likely to face. By the end of yesterday, there was no telephone connection with many hotels located in the resort area of Pangandaran, and the power supply there was also disrupted. However, in some places the phone worked. According to the staff of one of the hotels, which is located 200 meters from the water and which a RIA Novosti correspondent managed to reach by phone, there is no serious damage in the area. According to eyewitnesses, the wave damaged the facades of some hotels on the first line and threw small ships onto land. One of the coastal restaurants was also washed away into the sea. However, according to the Indonesian news agency Antara, along a roughly 40-kilometer stretch of Java's coastline from Pangandaran to the town of Cilacap, thousands of houses were destroyed or damaged by the wave and earthquake.
True, the tsunami phenomenon was not unexpected. The Tsunami Warning Center, located in Hawaii, issued a warning the day before and notified the population of Indonesia and Australia about the danger. Japan's National Meteorological Administration in Tokyo also said a tsunami was threatening the west coast of Sumatra and Australia's Christmas and Cocos Islands.
As for the dead, their official list will most likely continue to grow due to those missing at sea. For example, one eyewitness reported a whole group of elderly Dutch tourists being carried away by the wave. The Russian embassy denies the presence of our fellow citizens among the dead and wounded, simply because they do not go on vacation to these places. According to the head of the consular department, Sergei Meshcheryakov, “there are no Russians vacationing in Java and registered at the embassy.”
News of a tsunami in Indonesia is causing pain and panic after a monster wave struck the Indian Ocean coast from Indonesia to East Africa in December 2004, killing 230,000 people.