Lombok: Scores Die As Quake Again Hits Indonesian Island

• Posted on August 6, 2018
• by Ellsamwise King
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At least 91 people are now known to have died after a powerful earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Lombok.

Hundreds of people have been wounded by Sunday’s quake, officials say, mostly in the north of the island.

The 6.9 magnitude tremor was fairly shallow, occurring only 30km (18 miles) underground. It damaged thousands of buildings and triggered power cuts.

About 1,000 foreign tourists are being evacuated from the nearby Gili islands and at least one person died on Bali.

Video footage from Bali, to the west of Lombok, showed people running from their homes screaming.

There have been more than 130 aftershocks since the quake hit on Sunday morning.

A tsunami warning was issued but was lifted after a few hours.

It comes a week after another quake hit Lombok, popular with tourists who visit its beaches and hiking trails. That quake killed at least 16 people.

The two islands are home to about three and four million people respectively, but each year are visited by millions of tourists from around the globe.

A spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency told the AFP news agency that many buildings had been affected in Lombok’s main city of Mataram. Most of them had been built with weak construction materials.

Source: BBC