Quake barely noticed in Jakarta

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post , Jakarta

An earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale was felt in the capital on Thursday at 12:50 p.m., but there was no reports of casualties or damage.

Employees in high-rise buildings could feel the tremor, but most Jakartans were unaware of the earthquake, which lasted less than a minute.

"I felt the quake but it wasn't that strong," said Astuti Widyawati, an employee of a finance company on the 25th floor of the Jakarta Stock Exchange building on Jl. Sudirman, Central Jakarta.

The tremor did not panic employees, she said.

"It was not like the last quake, when our chairs and desks, as well as the lights shook," she said, referring to an earthquake in January.

Many people said they did not feel Thursday's tremor.

"I didn't feel it at all," said Rita, a staff member of an advertising company located in a two-story building in Mampang, South Jakarta.

The tremor's epicenter was near Panaitan island in the Indian Ocean, at a depth of about 75 kilometers beneath the sea and 230 kilometers from the capital, according to Muslich of the National Earthquake Center at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG).

The quake was also felt in Bengkulu and southern Sumatra.

He told The Jakarta Post that the quake was the result of the Indo-Australia plate moving toward and meeting the Eurasia plate, a movement that could reach up to seven centimeters.

"We could not predict the time of the meeting between the two plates, but southern Sumatra, Java and the Sunda Strait are more likely to experience earthquakes," he said.

Thursday's quake was the third this year in the city, where most high-rise buildings are not built to withstand earthquakes.

The first took place in January, measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale. The second was in March, measuring 3.5, so low that people did not feel it. The center of both quakes was in the Sunda Strait.

In October 2000, an earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale rocked most of the western part of Java, including Greater Jakarta.