Agency report
 
Sumatra, Sep 13: A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck near the Indonesian island of Sumatra at 6:49 am local time on Thursday, in the same area where a stronger temblor yesterday killed at least three people.

The quake hit 205 kilometers (123 miles) northwest of Bengkulu in southern Sumatra, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. The earthquake's depth was 10 kilometers. USGS earlier put the magnitude at 8 and revised it to 7.5, before revising it again.

Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency issued a tsunami warning and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center put out an alert for Indonesia and Australia, while it canceled earlier bulletins for Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

"Earthquakes of this size have the potential to generate a destructive local tsunami and sometimes a destructive regional tsunami along coasts located usually no more than a thousand kilometers from the earthquake epicenter,'' the Pacific Center said in its latest e-mailed alert.

Yesterday's 8.4 magnitude quake, the world's biggest since an 8.6 temblor struck Sumatra on March 28, 2005, killed three people, according to El shinta Radio. Today's quake was 226 kilometers north of yesterday's epicenter.

"Most of residents are camping out in front of their houses,'' Salamun Haris, deputy regent of Bengkulu Utara, said in a live interview on Jakarta-based El shinta. ``Today we will try to get help from other areas or the Bengkulu provincial government to bring in excavators.''

West Sumatra

West Sumatra province was struck by a magnitude 6 quake at 7:16 a.m. today, the Indonesian agency said.

PT Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, said its refinery on Sumatra was unaffected.

Operations at Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., the world's third-largest made-to-order chipmaker, haven't been affected by the earthquake, spokeswoman Khor Hwee Eng said by telephone.

Jeannie Ong, a spokeswoman at StarHub Ltd., Singapore's second-largest phone company, said the company's services and telecommunications cables weren't affected by the quake.