Two More Earthquakes Hit Indonesian Island, Killing More Than a Dozen

HONG KONG — The Indonesian island of Lombok was reeling Monday from two earthquakes that killed at least 14 people a day earlier, just two weeks after a separate earthquake devastated the island and killed at least 460 people.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, said in a statement that 12 people died on Lombok and neighboring Sumbawa Island when a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Lombok on Sunday night. He said two other people also died Sunday afternoon when a separate, 6.5-magnitude quake hit Lombok.

The new earthquakes came as the region was still recovering from the earthquake that struck Lombok and the three nearby Gili Islands on Aug. 5, wiping out entire villages and killing hundreds. The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of that quake at 6.9.

“This, of course, has increased the pain and deep sadness among the people of Lombok, who continue to be rocked” by the earlier event, Sutopo said of the new quakes in his statement.

Casualties aside, the Aug. 5 quake that struck off Lombok’s north coast injured 7,733 people, displaced more than 417,000 others and damaged more than 71,000 buildings, the disaster management agency reported last week.

More than a dozen aftershocks followed, but Sutopo said by telephone Monday that the earthquake Sunday night, which hit the eastern part of the island, was a fresh seismic event. He also said in a statement that more than 1,800 homes had been damaged in the two quakes Sunday.

In a video posted after the Sunday afternoon quake by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, an aid worker runs through a Lombok village telling people to leave their homes. “God is great,” he chants at one point. “God forgive me.”

After the Sunday night quake, “everybody ran in panic,” Imam Satriawan, a driver who works in Mataram, a city on the western side of Lombok Island, said in a text message. “We are still living in our car and the car shook.”

The Associated Press reported Monday that the earthquakes on Sunday caused landslides on the Mount Rinjani volcano, a popular tourist site on Lombok that has been closed to visitors since an earthquake killed 16 people there in July.

Last week, the disaster agency said the original earthquake caused about $511 million in economic damages.

Tourism is a mainstay of the economy in that part of Indonesia, and one worry among local businesses is that the earthquakes and aftershocks could discourage would-be visitors from coming to Lombok and the Gili Islands in the first place.