Tag Archives: collapsed buildings

Powerful quake kills 13 in Albania as buildings bury residents

By Benet Koleka and Fatos Bytyci

TIRANA/THUMANE (Reuters) – At least 13 people were killed when the most powerful earthquake to hit Albania in decades shook the capital Tirana and the country’s west and north on Tuesday, tearing down buildings and burying residents under rubble.

Residents, some carrying babies, fled apartment buildings in Tirana and the western port of Durres after the 6.4 magnitude quake struck shortly before 4 a.m. (0300 GMT).

In the northern town of Thumane, Marjana Gjoka, 48, was sleeping in her apartment on the fourth floor of a five-storey building when the quake shattered the top floors.

“The roof collapsed on our head and I don’t know how we escaped. God helped us,” said Gjoka, whose three-year-old niece was among four people in the apartment when the quake struck.

The quake was centered 30 km (19 miles) west of Tirana, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, and was also felt across the Balkans and in the southern Italian region of Puglia.

Hours later a magnitude 5.4 earthquake hit Bosnia, with an epicentre 75 km (45 miles) south of Sarajevo, monitors said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Five people were found dead in the rubble of apartment buildings in the northern Albanian town of Thumane and a man died in the town of Kurbin after jumping out of a building, a Defence Ministry spokeswoman said.

Seven bodies were pulled from collapsed buildings in Durres, the main port and tourism destination, the Defence Ministry said, adding 39 had been pulled out alive from under the ruins.

Defence Minister Olta Xhacka said 135 people were injured.

Firefighters, police and civilians were removing the debris from collapsed buildings in Thumane. Most of the buildings that collapsed were built of bricks, a Reuters reporter said.

Rescuers in Thumane used a mechanical digger to claw at collapsed masonry and remove a tangle of metal and cables. Others groped with bare hands to clear rubble.

Two people were pulled from rubble in Thumane four hours after the quake, a Reuters reporter said. Doctors said they were in a bad condition.

“Everything at home kept falling down,” Refik, a Tirana resident, said of the impact on his sixth-floor apartment.

“We were awake because of the previous quakes, but the last one shook us around,” he told Reuters, referring to smaller tremors recorded in the hour before the main quake.

Rescuers told local media one of the dead was an elderly woman who saved her grandson by cradling him with her body.

TRAPPED

Xhacka said the quake’s epicentre was in Durres. It was followed by 100 aftershocks.

“Durres and Thumane are the areas worst hit. Rescue-and-save work continues in the collapsed buildings there,” she said as troops pulled a victim from a hotel in Durres.

At least 135 people were injured, with 72 hospitalized, Xhacka said. Two planes from fellow NATO-member Romania were expected to land with specialized search and rescue equipment and help was coming from Italy and Turkey, Xhacka said.

Greece had sent emergency services for search and rescue operations, its premier’s office said.

“Firefighters and army staff are helping residents under the rubble”, in Durres and Thumane, the Defence Ministry said.

An unidentified man, with a wound dressing on his right cheek, told News24 TV his daughter and niece were among those trapped in a collapsed apartment building in Durres.

“I talked with my daughter and niece on the phone. They said they are well and are waiting for the rescue. Could not talk to my wife. There are other families, but I could not talk to them,” the man said.

Located along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, between Greece and Macedonia, Albania experiences regular seismic activity.

An earthquake of 5.6 magnitude shook the country on Sept. 21, damaging around 500 houses and destroying some. The Defence Ministry had said it was the most powerful quake in Albania in the last 30 years.

The images of collapsed buildings in urban areas suggested Tuesday’s quake was more powerful than one in 1979 which razed a neighborhood of a northern town. Neither of those two earlier earthquakes caused fatalities.

The Balkan nation is the poorest country in Europe, with an average income of less than a third of the European Union average, according to Eurostat data.

(Reporting by Benet Koleka in Tirana and Fatos Bytyci in Thumane; Writing by William Maclean; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Tsunami hits small city on Indonesia’s Sulawesi after quake: officials

A paramedic gives treatment to an earthquake survivor outside a hospital in Donggala, Indonesia Sulawesi Island, September 28, 2018. Antara Foto/HO/BNPB-Sutopo Purwo N via REUTERS

By Tabita Diela and Gayatri Suroyo

JAKARTA (Reuters) – A tsunami of up to two meters hit a small city on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi after a major 7.5 quake struck offshore on Friday, collapsing buildings and washing a vessel ashore, but there was no word on casualties, officials said.

Authorities received information that Palu had been hit, said Dwikorita Karnawati, who heads Indonesia’s meteorology and geophysics agency, BMKG, amid a rapid series of aftershocks.

“The 1.5- to two-meter tsunami has receded,” Karnawati told Reuters. “It ended. The situation is chaotic, people are running on the streets and buildings collapsed. There is a ship washed ashore,” she added.

BMKG had earlier issued a tsunami warning, but lifted it within the hour.

Amateur footage shown by local TV stations, which could not immediately be confirmed by Reuters, showed waters crashing into houses along Palu’s shoreline.

The national search and rescue agency will deploy a large ship and helicopters to aid with the operation, said agency chief Muhammad Syaugi, adding that he had not been able to contact his team in Palu.

Palu, hit by a 6.2 magnitude quake in 2005 which killed one person, is a tourist resort at the end of a narrow bay famous for its beaches and water sports.

In 2004, an earthquake off the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean, killing 226,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.

Earlier on Friday, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) said it was having difficulty reaching some authorities in Palu and the fishing town of Donggala, closest to the epicenter of the quake 80 km (50 miles) away at a shallow 10 km underground.

Palu airport was closed.

The area was hit by a lighter quake earlier in the day, which destroyed some houses, killing one person and injuring at least 10 in Donggala, authorities said.

Some people took to Twitter saying they could not contact loved ones. “My family in Palu is unreachable,” Twitter user @noyvionella said.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the second quake at a strong 7.5, after first saying it was 7.7.

More than 600,000 people live in Donggala and Palu.

“The (second) quake was felt very strongly, we expect more damage and more victims,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, BNPB spokesman said.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes.

A series of earthquakes in July and August killed nearly 500 people on the holiday island of Lombok, hundreds of kilometers southwest of Sulawesi.

(Reporting by Jakarta newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie)

At least 14 dead in Papua New Guinea quake; ExxonMobil shuts LNG plant

Locals surround a house that was covered by a landslide in the town of Mendi after an earthquake struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands in this image taken February 27, 2018 obtained from social media. Francis Ambrose/via REUTERS

By Sonali Paul and Melanie Burton

MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Up to 14 people were killed in landslides and by collapsed buildings during a powerful earthquake in the remote Papua New Guinea highlands, police and a hospital worker said on Tuesday, with unconfirmed reports of up to 30 dead.

The 7.5 magnitude quake that rocked the region early on Monday also damaged mining and power infrastructure and led ExxonMobil Corp to shut its $19 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, the country’s biggest export earner.

Two buildings collapsed and along with a landslide killed 12 people in Mendi, the provincial capital of the Southern Highlands, said Julie Sakol, a nurse at Mendi General Hospital, where the bodies were brought to the morgue.

“People are afraid. The shaking is still continuing. There’s nowhere to go but people are just moving around,” she said.

Dozens of aftershocks rattled the area, including a 5.7 quake on Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

Police in Mendi said 14 people were killed in the initial quake, including three in Poroma, south of Mendi.

“They were killed by landslides destroying families sleeping in their houses,” said Naring Bongi, a police officer in Mendi.

Provincial Administrator William Bando said more than 30 people were believed to have been killed in the rugged region, about 560 km (350 miles) northwest of the capital, Port Moresby, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier reported.

The PNG disaster management office said it was verifying the reports but it could take days to confirm a death toll.

With a lack of communications preventing a clear assessment of damage, aid agencies had not yet begun relief efforts, said Udaya Regmi, head of the International Red Cross in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby.

“The magnitude of the earthquake is quite huge, so there must be an impact … but we cannot say how many people are actually affected and what they need,” Regmi said.

Prime Minister Peter O’Neill said the defense force was on standby to assist “when the extent of damage has been confirmed.”

ocals stand next to a damaged house near a landslide in the town of Tari after an earthquake struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands in this image taken February 27, 2018 obtained from social media. Francis Ambrose/via REUTERS

Locals stand next to a damaged house near a landslide in the town of Tari after an earthquake struck Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands in this image taken February 27, 2018 obtained from social media. Francis Ambrose/via REUTERS

“We know that there have been houses lost, roads cut by land slips and disruption to services,” he said in a statement.

ExxonMobil said communications with nearby communities remained down, hampering efforts to assess damage to its facilities that feed the PNG LNG plant.

“Communications continue to be one of the most significant challenges,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Its partner, Oil Search Ltd, said a review of all of its facilities and infrastructure would take at least a week, and an industry source told Reuters that the Exxon plant will likely be shut at least seven days.

Miners Barrick Gold Corp and Ok Tedi Mining also reported damage to infrastructure.

LNG SHUTDOWN

The PNG LNG project is considered one of the world’s best-performing LNG operations, having started exports in 2014 ahead of schedule, despite the challenge of drilling for gas and building a plant and pipeline in the remote jungle of PNG.

The liquefaction plant has also been producing at around 20 percent above its rated capacity of 6.9 million tonnes a year.

ExxonMobil said it shut the two LNG processing units, or trains, at its site on the coast near Port Moresby after earlier shutting its Hides gas conditioning plant and Hides production pads in Hela province in the highlands region.

Gas is processed at Hides and transported along a 700 km (435 miles) line that feeds the PNG LNG plant, whose main customers are in Japan, China and Taiwan.

Traders said the impact on the LNG market would depend on the duration of the shutdown, but noted that spot prices have recently fallen from more than $10 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) as North Asia is coming out of the period of heavy winter gas demand. [LNG/]

“The global LNG market is likely to respond immediately as the buyers need to seek alternative sources,” said Boseok Jin, a research analyst at HIS Markit.

INFRASTRUCTURE DAMAGE

Barrick said some activities at the Porgera gold mine have been suspended to save electricity as the power station that supplies the mine had been damaged.

The mine is co-owned by Barrick and China’s Zijin Mining.

State-owned Ok Tedi said by email that a landslip had blocked a road and damaged pipelines to its copper and gold mine in the Star Mountains, adding that the road would take up to two days to be cleared.

Earthquakes are common in Papua New Guinea, which sits on the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire”, a hotspot for seismic activity due to friction between tectonic plates. Part of PNG’s northern coast was devastated in 1998 by a tsunami, generated by a 7.0 quake, which killed about 2,200 people.

(Reporting by Melanie Burton and Sonali Paul; Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook in SYDNEY, Charlotte Greenfield in WELLINGTON, Jessica Jaganathan and Oleg Vukmanovic in SINGAPORE, and Osamu Tsukimori in TOKYO; Editing by Richard Pullin, Tom Hogue, William Maclean)