Suara.com – Head of the BMKG Earthquake and Tsunami Center, Daryono, said that Sumedang in West Java has the fate of several cities in Indonesia which are crossed by active faults.
It was previously reported that BMKG had discovered an active fault that crossed Sumedang City and triggered a damaging earthquake on December 31 2023. The active fault was later named the Sumedang Fault.
“The Sumedang earthquake is of human interest regarding the name of the earthquake generating fault. The relocated BMKG earthquake hypocenter data shows that the seismicity cluster tends to trend North-South, across Sumedang City,” said Daryono in a webinar in Newsdelivers.com, Thursday (11/1/2024).
According to him, Sumedang is similar to a number of cities where active fault lines pass, such as Palu with the Palu-Koro Fault; Sorong with Sorong Fault; Aceh with the Aceh Fault; Gorontalo with the Gorontalo Fault; Semarang with the Semarang Fault; and Lembang with the Lembang Fault.
“The name of an active fault refers to the name of a place at risk so it will provide a message of earthquake preparedness and mitigation education for the local community,” said Daryono.
Daryono further explained that the Sumedang earthquake that occurred at the end of 2023 was thought to be a repetition of the earthquake on August 14, 1955.
“Don’t forget history, in seismology we know the concept of the return period or earthquake return period, that an earthquake that has occurred in a place will one day happen again,” he said.
He added that the Sumedang earthquake gave a message that people should study the history of past earthquakes in their respective areas.
“It could be that one day an earthquake will occur again in a place we consider safe because of ignorance of the history of destructive earthquakes in the past,” he said.
He said that the earthquake return period also sends a message about the importance of preparedness for earthquake disasters that may occur in the future.
Daryono said that the Sumedang earthquake was triggered by active fault activity that had not been mapped. The Sumedang earthquake is similar to the M5.3 Solok earthquake in 2019, the M6.5 Ambon earthquake (2019), the M7.4 Flores Sea earthquake (2021), the M6.5 Central Sulawesi Ampana earthquake (2021) and the M5.6 Cianjur earthquake (2022).