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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lkdood" data-source="post: 5611467" data-attributes="member: 92282">* Death toll expected to rise further - vice president      * Schools, hospitals, hotels collapse in quake-prone Padang      * 7.6 quake shakes tall buildings in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur      * Padang area long seen as facing major threat from big quake A powerful earthquake  struck off the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island on  Wednesday, killing at least 75 people and trapping thousands  under rubble, officials said.      The death toll was likely to rise as many buildings in the  city of 900,000 people had collapsed, Vice President Jusuf Kalla  told a late night news conference in Jakarta.      "We have received a report from the mayor of Padang that the  death toll is 75. But many others are trapped in collapsed shops,  building and hotels. It is difficult to know because it is dark  now," Kalla said.      TV footage showed devastation, with piles of rubble and  smashed houses after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake, which caused  widespread panic across the city.      Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry's disaster  centre in Jakarta, said "thousands of people are trapped in the  rubble of buildings".      The main hospital had collapsed, roads were cut by landslides  and Metro Television said the roof of Padang airport had caved  in. Thousands were expected to spend the night in the open while a  full assessment of the damage would need to wait until daybreak.      The disaster is the latest in a spate of natural and man-made  calamities to hit Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 226  million people.      Kalla said the government was preparing for an emergency  response of up to two months.      Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie said authorities should  prepare for the worst, adding damage could be on a par with an  earthquake in the central Java city of Yogyakarta in 2006 that  killed 5,000 people and damaged or destroyed 150,000 homes.      The quake was felt around the region, with some high-rise  buildings in Singapore, 440 km (275 miles) to the northeast,  evacuating staff. Office buildings also shook in the Malaysian  capital, Kuala Lumpur.      The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre cancelled an earlier  tsunami alert.      "Hundreds of houses have been damaged along the road. There  are some fires, bridges are cut and there is extreme panic here,"  said a Reuters witness in the city, who also said broken water  pipes had triggered flooding.      His mobile phone was then cut off and officials said power  had been severed in the city. A resident called Adi later told  Metro Television there was devastation around him.      "For now I can't see dead bodies, just collapsed houses. Some  half destroyed, others completely. People are standing around too  scared to go back inside. They fear a tsunami," said Adi.      "No help has arrived yet. I can see small children standing  around carrying blankets. Some people are looking for relatives  but all the lights have gone out completely."      Sumatra is home to some of the country's largest oil fields  as well as its oldest liquefied natural gas terminal, although  there were no immediate reports of damage to those facilities.     PADANG LONG SEEN AT RISK      Padang, capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on  one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of  Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia  plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.      A 9.15 magnitude quake, with its epicentre roughly 600 km  (373 miles) northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami which  killed 232,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province, Thailand, Sri  Lanka, India, and other countries across the Indian Ocean.      The depth of Wednesday's earthquake was 85 km (53 miles), the  United States Geological Survey said. It revised down the  magnitude of the quake from 7.9 to 7.6.      A series of tsunamis earlier on Wednesday smashed into the  Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa, and Tonga  killing possibly more than 100 people, some washed out to sea,  destroying villages and injuring hundreds.      Geologists have long said Padang may one day be destroyed by  a huge earthquake because of its location.      "Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest  potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake," said Danny Hilman  Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute, in   February.      "The entire city could drown" in a tsunami triggered by such  a quake, he warned.      Several earthquake-prone parts of the country hold tsunami  practice drills, and the national disaster service sends alerts  via telephone text messages to subscribers.      But some experts have long said Indonesia needs to do more to  reduce the risk of catastrophe. Reuters</blockquote>

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