Dec. 22 (UPI) — A tsunami hit beaches around Sunda Strait in Indonesia late Saturday, killing at least 222 people and injuring 843 others, one day after a volcano erupted, the government’s Disaster Mitigation Agency said.
Twenty-eight people, including members of the Indonesian pop group Seventeen, remain missing, CNN reported.
One of the musicians and the group’s manager were confirmed dead.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroh, head of the Disaster Mitigation Agency, said on national television dozens of buildings were damaged and streets flooded between the islands of Java and Sumatra when the tsunami struck around 9:30 p.m. Saturday.
He said undersea landslides after the Krakatoa volcano erupted possibly caused the tsunami.
Indonesia’s geologic agency said that the volcano struck for two minutes and 12 seconds Friday.
”Authorities here are saying that this might in fact have been a tsunami caused by the activity of the volcanic eruption I was photographing,” Oystein Lund Andersen, an employee of the Norwegian embassy in Jakarta, posted on Facebnook.
He was on vacation with his family in Anyer on the Javanese coast, 76 miles west of the Jakarta, the nation’s capital.
”I was myself at the beach photographing the well known volcano — Anak-Krakatau, when I suddenly saw a big wave came,” Oystein Lund Andersen, an employee of the Norwegian embassy in Jakarta, posted on Facebook. ‘I had to run, as the wave passed the beach and landed 15-20m inland. Next wave entered the hotel area where i was staying and downed cars on the road behind it. Managed to evacuate with my family to higher ground trough forest paths and villages, where we are taken care of my the locals.”
In September, several hundred people died when a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck just off the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi, setting off a tsunami that engulfed the coastal city of Palu.
