3 dead, IMF delegates evacuated as Indonesia rocked by another powerful earthquake
Three people were killed and up to 30 injured when a magnitude 6.0 earthquake hit 40km offshore Java and Bali, Indonesia. Thousands of delegates attending the IMF and World Bank summit were on the islands at the time of the quake.
“I felt the quake for at least 30 seconds and I panicked. At first I didn’t want to go out but then I decided to leave,” Katharina Sudiyono, an Indonesian attendee at the summit, told the AFP.
Many delegates attending the IMF and World Bank Summit in Bali, including finance ministers and central bankers from 189 countries, briefly evacuated their hotels as a precautionary measure, but no tsunami warning was issued. More than 26,000 police and military personnel have been deployed to guard the summit.
“Many summit participants woke up and asked questions, but we immediately sent out information to them that there had been an earthquake and the impact in Nusa Dua,” Peter Jacobs, head of the Indonesian Central Bank's IMF-World Bank taskforce, told the AFP.
The earthquake did not cause “significant damage or any disruption to the meetings” conference organizers said in a statement. The three victims of the quake died in localized building collapses.
The temblor was followed by a 7.0 quake off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which did trigger a tsunami warning, but this was later called off.
Singapore’s Minister for Defense Ng Eng Hen shared his experience of the earthquake on Facebook.
The quake comes just two weeks after the 7.5 magnitude earthquake which triggered a tsunami, both of which killed over 2,000 people combined.
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