New Delhi: India issued a tsunami warning on Monday for its Andaman and Nicobar islands, which are located near Indonesia, officials said.
Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said the Government is keeping a close watch on the situation for the next three to four hours. "A team has been sent to Andaman and Nicobar Islands to monitor the tidal waves," Sibal said.
He said no rise in water level has been noticed so far.
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| Tsunami warning system for India | Keeping the community afloat after the tsunami | ||
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| Birth of Hope | Tribute to the Ocean | ||
The Indonesian island of Java was hit by a tsunami earlier in the day. "We have alerted all the people in the coastal areas but there is no evacuation yet," deputy commissioner of Nicobar group of islands, Ankita Mishra, told Reuters from Car Nicobar island.
Another official, Vikas Anand, said that a warning had also been issued for the Andaman part of the archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.
However, Union Home Ministry denied it issued any Tsunami.
''The Home Ministry has not issued any Tsunami warning,'' a ministry official said.
According to the Home Ministry, the Disaster Management Authority responsible for Tsunami alerts decided not to issue any warning in the absence of any threat from today's earthquake.
''The situation was watched closely by the Disaster Management Authority, but felt there was no need to sound an alert,'' said the official.
The 7.2 magnitude earthquake, which hit Jakarta and Java Islands at 14:24 pm (local time), caused tall buildings to sway in Jakarta and at least one other city on Java Island for around two minutes, witnesses said.
Japan's Meteorological Agency said in a statement that there is a possibility of a destructive local tsunami in the Indian Ocean. If triggered, waves should start reaching shores in the region within an hour, it said.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a similar bulletin. Preliminary reports said the earthquake sent a six-foot-high tsunami crashing into a beach resort on Indonesia's Java island, killing at least five people and damaging hotels and houses. An AP report said people fled to a local hill to escape the wave on Pangandaran beach in West Java.
The Japanese and Pacific tsunami warning centres did not give the depth of the quake, but local media reports quoting Indonesian officials said it was more than 30 km below the ocean floor. Indonesia is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the so-called Pacific 'Ring of Fire', an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
A massive 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed at least 216,000 people — nearly half of them in Indonesia's Aceh province. On May 27, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake devastated a large swath of Java Island, killing more than 5,800 people.
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