Experts give logical explanation for quake

JAKARTA (JP): To the superstitious, yesterday's earthquake may have been a premonition of sorts, but experts say there is a logical and scientific explanation for the phenomenon.

A member of staff at the National Earthquake Center in Jakarta described it as follows: "The Indo-Australia plate shifted northward and collided with the Eurasia plate at the subduction zone in the Indian Ocean seabed. The friction caused the release of tectonic energy in the form of seismic waves".

Those may be comforting words but even experts say that the best of equipment cannot predict whether another quake would hit Jakarta, how big and, more importantly, when it might be.

The capital does not have a history of devastating earthquakes but they are unpredictable and current equipment only details them after they happen.

The Meteorology and Geophysics Agency in Jakarta, where the quake center is housed, measured yesterday's tremor at 6.0 on the Richter scale.

It registered nine milder tremors after the big one. There were also other tremors after 5 p.m. but they were too small to be registered by the seismograph, a member of staff at the agency said.

Irwan Bahar, head of the Geological Research and Development Center in Bandung, said the worst thing one could do in a major earthquake was panic.

"The first thing you should do is to get into an open space. If you can't, go and hide under a table or a bed, and then leave the building at the first opportunity you think it is safe.

"The main thing is don't panic," Irwan told The Jakarta Post.

"A building usually develops cracks before it falls to the ground. So the first quake is not likely to kill," he said.

The number of fatalities in any earthquake could be minimized if the public understood more about the phenomenon through an information campaign, Irwan said.

"We are not doing this frequently enough. People usually make noises about an information campaign after an earthquake and then they forget about it until the next earthquake," he said.

Indonesia could hold drills at schools to teach children how to behave in an earthquake, as they do in Japan, he said.

He appealed to the media, especially television stations, to help disseminate information about earthquakes, particularly the materials and designs people should use to build their houses with in earthquake-prone areas. (04/12)