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BENGKULU, Indonesia : Huge aftershocks rumbled across Indonesia's Sumatra island on Thursday but officials said the damage from a massive earthquake that killed 10 people was not as bad as feared.
The announcement was welcome news for terrified residents who had spent the night outdoors, afraid of being buried alive after the powerful quake hit at dusk Wednesday on the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Officials warned the death toll could still rise. In many places, phone lines and electricity were down, and emergency teams were racing to remote areas to assess the extent of casualties and damage.
But Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the destruction that officials feared simply due to the sheer power of the 8.4 quake -- a magnitude of 7.0 is considered capable of causing mass casualties -- did not seem to have occurred.
"Yesterday we expected massive destruction. But from the reports coming in this morning we are grateful that the damage is not as big as we thought," Kalla told a press briefing, local reports said.
Many residents said it was a miracle that there had been so few casualties even though, in some areas, many houses and buildings had been toppled by the quake's destructive force.
Officials in Bengkulu, the town closest to the epicentre of the undersea quake, said six people had been killed in the area.
Four others were killed elsewhere.
Dozens were injured, and hundreds of homes were damaged.
"It's a miracle that nobody in this village was killed," said 42-year-old Mukhtar, a resident of nearby Kota Agung where scores of homes were flattened.
Many residents said they believed they had survived because they rushed out of their homes as soon as they felt the ground rocking - something they learned in a bitter lesson after a deadly quake here in 2000.
"When the buildings collapsed, there was no one still inside," said Rosdaniar, a 45-year-old mother of five who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.
The quake on Wednesday was strong enough to shake buildings in Thailand and Malaysia, and set off a tsunami alert as far away as eastern Africa - raising memories of the December 2004 tsunami catastrophe that killed 220,000 people.
But this nation of 17,000 islands, victim of some of the world's deadliest earthquakes in the past, may have been spared the worst.
Indonesia's Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie headed a delegation of ministers rushing to worst-hit Bengkulu province by a charter flight to assess what rescue and relief efforts were needed.
In Jakarta, relief aid was being loaded onto aircraft including tonnes of food and medicine, an ambulance, generators and other supplies.
Most of the houses which were toppled were believed to be on South Pagai island, where authorities could not immediately be reached. But houses on the island are typically made of light materials, which would reduce casualties.
The quake was powerful enough to slosh the water out of swimming pools in Jakarta, hundreds of kilometres away, and scare office workers into racing out of their high-rise towers in Malaysia.
In Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of people along the coast went running for higher ground after the government issued a tsunami warning on Wednesday night.
Indonesia lost 168,000 people in Sumatra's Aceh province alone in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.
The country sits on the volatile "Ring of Fire", a massive zone of volcanic instability that encircles the Pacific. - AFP/ch
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