Quake rocks Indonesia - SOS projects safe

Thousands of islanders ran screaming into the street this morning (Thurs) as another earthquake hit Sumatra.
The second strong quake hit the Indonesian island early as the island was reeling from a jolt just 12 hours earlier that killed more than 400 people and caused widespread destruction.Women and children sat helplessly crying outside their demolished homes. Meanwhile, local TV footage showed earthmovers breaking through layers of cement searching for 30 children it said were missing and feared dead at a school.“I was studying math with my friends when suddenly a powerful earthquake destroyed everything around me,” a schoolboy told Indonesia’s TVOne. He escaped out of the top floor just as the three-story structure, used for after-school classes, crumpled.

A major city hospital was also among the many buildings that had buckled in the quake, health officials said.Rescuers were still trying to find the tens of thousands of people trapped in the rubble of the first quake when a 6.8 magnitude quake hit the south of the south east Asian island, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said. It was so powerful that it was felt hundreds of miles away in Malaysia and Singapore, where it sent buildings swaying. The earlier quake yesterday was 7.6 magnitude. Officials fear the death toll will climb into the thousands. "Our prediction is that thousands have died," Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry's disaster centre in Jakarta told the BBC.
There is little news yet about the damage from the first quake, which happened just after 5pm yesterday afternoon. Already, as many as 464 people were dead and more than 500 were injured, from the first, Tugiyo Bisri, spokesman for the Indonesian Social Affairs Ministry's Crisis Centre told reporters. The worst hit was the west Sumatra capital of Padang, where 376 people died he said.A doctor working in Padang told the BBC: "There's quite a few people that have died. At first I was thinking it was going to be in the hundreds but it's going to be in the thousands of people that have been crushed or trapped." "We need aid as soon as possible,” one person living in the coastal city told Reuters news agency. “We need food and medicine. Our houses have collapsed." Earlier Priyadi Kardono, a spokesman for Indonesia's National Disaster Agency, said more than 500 houses and buildings had collapsed.

SOS Children’s Villages Indonesia informed us that the quake had no impact on the SOS families and facilities. The tremors were felt at Banda Aceh and Medan but no damage has occurred. It is not clear yet, if SOS Children's Villages Indonesia is launching an emergency programme - we will of course keep you informed. In Cambodia and Vietnam where typhoon "Ketsana" hit fatally and now is weakening over, SOS Children’s Village facilities are unaffected. Earlier this week "Ketsana" battered the Philippines where SOS Children’s Villages already initiated a small emergency relief programme. We are expecting an update from Manila for today or tomorrow.