JAKARTA — The rescue teams cannot get through. That is the detail repeating across emergency dispatches from Flores Island on Saturday, eight hours after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off its northern coast and 20 bodies were already found near a port town that sits 42 miles from the epicenter, not in it.
The closest regency to where the ground fractured, Nagekeo, went quiet. Communications signals into the area collapsed with the buildings. Indonesia’s national disaster mitigation agency, BNPB, said about 2,000 residents in Nagekeo had been evacuated before the blackout set in, but no emergency teams had yet made it in. What they will find when they do, officials have not said.
Fathur Rahman, head of the rescue agency in Maumere, the port town roughly 68 kilometres from the epicenter, told Al Jazeera that teams there had recovered 20 dead, six injured and two people trapped under rubble. These are the numbers from the periphery. The centre of the disaster, as of Saturday morning, remains a closed room.
The earthquake struck at 5:58am local time on Saturday, with the United States Geological Survey placing its epicenter about 68 kilometres north-northwest of the city of Ende in East Nusa Tenggara province. USGS put the depth at 10 kilometres. At that depth, a shallow earthquake releases far more destructive energy at the surface, with less rock to absorb the shock before it reaches populated areas.
Three aftershocks followed within half an hour, measuring magnitudes 5.9, 5.6 and 6.1. Aftershocks at those magnitudes are capable of collapsing already-damaged structures, complicating rescue efforts in any zone where buildings have been weakened but not yet searched.
East Nusa Tenggara police chief Rudi Darmoko described what his officers were encountering as severe damage and collapsed buildings. Power outages across cities and villages had cut the flow of information in both directions. Rescue teams cannot reach affected communities, and affected communities cannot call for help. The two problems compound each other.
Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, known as BMKG, issued a tsunami warning for affected coastlines immediately after the earthquake, urging residents to stay away from beaches and riverbanks and move to higher ground. The warning was subsequently lifted. Whether any wave reached shore before the warning could is not yet confirmed.
The USGS estimated that more than half a million people on Flores Island experienced what it classifies as “very strong” shaking, with moderate to strong shaking felt by several million more across the wider region. Twenty confirmed dead against half a million people in the strong-shaking zone suggests either much of Flores Island’s infrastructure held, or the reporting from the worst-affected zones has not yet started. The second possibility is the one officials appear more worried about.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent Jessica Washington, reporting from Jakarta, said that aftershocks could persist for “several days” according to local meteorological agencies. In northern parts of the island, residents have been ordered to evacuate as the extent of damage continues to emerge. Several affected areas remain inaccessible to first responders, with authorities advising residents to stay away from shores and damaged buildings.
Flores Island’s vulnerability is not theoretical. In December 1992, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck the same stretch of coastline. The shaking alone caused widespread damage, but the tsunami that followed killed more than 2,500 people, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in Indonesian history at the time. The 2026 earthquake and the 1992 disaster are not directly comparable: the tsunami warning was lifted Saturday without confirmed wave impact. But the physical geography is the same faultline, the same island, the same coastal villages, and the memory of 1992 runs through every evacuation order issued Saturday morning.
Indonesia, a nation of more than 270 million people spread across roughly 17,000 islands, sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, the arc of tectonic plate boundaries that accounts for roughly 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes. It is one of the most seismically active countries on Earth, a reality that has made Indonesians familiar with sudden disaster from below the sea as well as above. Five survivors were rescued earlier this summer after three days adrift following a ferry sinking off South Sulawesi. The 7.7 event on Saturday is the strongest to strike within or near Indonesian territory since at least July.
The pattern is familiar if not reassuring. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake killed at least 22 people in Colombia in early August, collapsing the terminal at an airport and a cathedral tower. Before that, a 7.1-magnitude quake in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture left 34 dead and halted production at several major automakers when a supplier plant was damaged. None of these events are linked by anything other than the physics of where tectonic energy accumulates along plate margins. Saturday, it was Flores Island’s turn, and the full accounting for what that means is still pending.
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