Strong Earthquake Hits Off Indonesia’s Sumatra Island

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – A powerful undersea earthquake rattled western Indonesia on Wednesday, officials said, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The 6.4-magnitude quake was centered 80 miles southwest of Padang, a town on Sumatra island still recovering from a series of strong tremors that killed nearly two dozen people earlier this month, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

It struck nearly 21 miles beneath the ocean floor just before midnight, a local agency said. Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

A massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, killed more than 131,000 people in Indonesia’s Aceh province and left half a million homeless.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)