JAKARTA — Office workers fled high-rise buildings in the Indonesian capital on Tuesday (Jan 23) after a strong earthquake shook the city, causing some injuries and damage to at least 130 buildings elsewhere on the densely populated island of Java.

The relatively shallow quake of magnitude 6 struck off Java, the United States Geological Survey said, and authorities ruled out the risk of a tsunami.

Many people ran along the streets of downtown Jakarta, pointing at the buildings above them, witnesses said. Metro TV showed patients being evacuated from a hospital.

The quake struck about 104 km west of the city of Sukabumi, at a depth of 44 km. Jakarta is about 100 km away.

“In Cianjur, six students were seriously injured and two students suffered light injuries when the (school) roof collapsed,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster agency, said in a statement, referring to a district of West Java province.

Besides schools, more than 130 houses and a mosque were damaged in the provinces of West Java and Banten, the agency said.

Kaprawi, a duty officer with the Regional Disaster Management Agency in Banten province, which lies in the West Java region, said that as of Tuesday afternoon, 105 homes had been damaged, a vast majority of them lightly, although a small number were flattened.

The quake was felt for about 10 to 15 seconds in Jakarta, though many residents thought it lasted far longer.

“I was just sitting down, then I felt the building swaying,” said Rudy Togatorop, 35, who works at the Chilean embassy. “The emergency stairs were very narrow. I was worried if something would happen.”

“It felt like a giant rock had dropped either in the hallway or just outside the building,” said Marcoen Stoop, a Belgian businessman who lives on the 35th floor of an apartment building in Jakarta.

“Then, the building started swaying and the swaying increased steadily,” he added, saying the rocking lasted less than a minute.

Hesti Dimalia, 27, a local newspaper journalist, said she hid under a table in an eighth-floor newsroom in South Jakarta after the temblor struck, then ran down an emergency stairwell to the street after building security instructed everyone to evacuate.

"I was afraid, afraid I was going to die," she said. "I remembered my little kid at home. That's why I was shouting, 'Allahu akbar,' so he would protect me," she said, referring to the Arabic phrase "God is great."

As of Tuesday evening, there were no other official reports of injuries, and no fatalities had been reported.

Indonesia sits on the geologically active Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes. In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami killed 226,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.

In December, a quake of 6.5 magnitude killed at least three people when it hit Java, at a depth of 92 km (57 miles), and buildings in Jakarta swayed for several seconds.

The World Bank reckons natural disasters cost Indonesia 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product annually, but a 2015 government report on disaster risk management said a major earthquake, occurring once every 250 years, could cause losses in excess of US$30 billion (S$39.6 billion), or 3 per cent of GDP. AGENCIES