Residents walked through an area damaged by the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia, on Thursday. Dita Alangkara/Associated PressEvery building over three stories in Padang suffered damage from the initial quake, and the city’s three main hospitals all collapsed. At the biggest hopsital, Djamil, beds were pulled from the wreckage to serve the injured.
Padang, a port city of 900,000, is on the west-central coast of Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island. The western coast is stippled with dozens of volcanoes, and Padang also sits alongside the Sunda Trench, part of the notorious Ring of Fire, the volatile network of volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches that partly encircles the Pacific Basin. The ring — and Sumatra in particular — is a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Elsewhere in the basin, on Tuesday, an underwater earthquake measuring 8.0 created a tsunami that sent massive walls of water crashing into the islands of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.
Reports from government officials, the police, aid workers and news agencies showed Thursday that at least 154 people had been killed by the tsunami — 115 on Samoa, 30 on American Samoa and 9 on Tonga. FULL STORY
