6.3-magnitude quake strikes south of Indonesia’s Bali

DENPASAR – A strong earthquake jolted Indonesia’s holiday island of Bali early on Thursday (March 19), but no tsunami warning was issued.

The quake struck at 1.45am with an epicentre 255km south of the town of Nusa Dua, the US Geological Service reported.

The epicentre was a relatively shallow 10km deep.

Indonesia’s weather and geophysics bureau said there was no tsunami threat.

No casualties or infrastructure damage have been reported so far, but the quake was strongly felt across the holiday island.

A hotel staffer Indra Kurniawan just got home from work when the jolt shook his boarding house in Canggu, Bali.

“The shaking was not that powerful but ones could feel it. It lasted not more than a minute,” he told AFP.

The South-east Asian archipelago is one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth.

In 2018, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people dead or missing.

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Indonesia suffers frequent seismic and volcanic activity due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide.

More than 2,200 people died and another 1,000 were declared missing in 2018 after a 7.5 magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami on Sulawesi island.

A 9.1 magnitude earthquake on Dec 26 in 2004 struck Aceh province, causing a tsunami that claimed the lives of more than 170,000 people in Indonesia alone.