Experts give logical explanation for quake
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)