Indonesian officials issued a tsunami warning Friday after a powerful earthquake rocked the island of Sulawesi.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude 7.5 quake was centered at a depth of 6 miles (10 kilometers) about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northeast of the central Sulawesi town of Donggala. It was the second powerful quake to strike the area Friday.
An official with the local disaster agency, Akris, said “many houses have collapsed.”
“It happened while we still have difficulties in collecting data from nine villages affected by the first quake,” he told The Associated Press. “People ran out in panic.”
The area was hit earlier Friday by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake that killed one person, injured 10 and damaged dozens of houses.
Indonesia is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
In December 2004, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra in western Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
