BANGKOK — The arrangements for a beach festival were underway, with dancers and other performers preparing to gather by the sea, when an enormous tsunami triggered by a strong earthquake swept over part of the eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Friday evening. The twin disasters — a 7.5-magnitude earthquake, and the swirling wall of water it unleashed tens of minutes later — killed at least 384 people in the city of Palu, the site of the festival, and destroyed thousands of buildings there, including a shopping mall, a hotel, seaside restaurants, beachfront homes and several mosques. “We have found corpses from the earthquake as well as bodies swept up by the tsunami,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the Indonesian disaster agency, said in a television interview. Indonesian officials were preparing for a sharp rise in the death toll because search and rescue teams had yet to reach populous coastal settlements near Palu. Vice President Jusuf Kalla of Indonesia told a local news website that thousands may have died, with an unknown number washed out to sea.

Source: New York Times September 29, 2018 16:46 UTC