MANADO, Indonesia (AP) -- A powerful earthquake shook northeastern Indonesia Sunday, damaging buildings in at least one town and causing panicked residents to flee in fear of a tsunami, officials and media reports said.
Officials initially said the 7.3 quake off Sulawesi island had the potential to cause a tsunami, but no destructive waves were reported.
One witness said three people were slightly injured when a church was damaged in Manado city, the regional capital of Sulawesi, but it was unclear how they were hurt.
A reporter for Metro TV said she had seen several cracked or slightly damaged buildings and that hundreds of people ran inland to higher ground or raced off in cars and on motorcycles, causing massive traffic jams.
The Indonesian seismological institute, which put the tremor at 6.7 magnitude, issued a tsunami alert via local television and radio after the earthquake hit around 10 kilometers (6 miles) under the sea floor.
The epicenter was 130 kilometers (around 80 miles) from the city of Ternate in the Maluku capital and more than 2,200 kilometers (nearly 1,400 miles) northeast of Jakarta.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which recorded a more powerful 7.6 magnitude, had said a regional tsunami was possible.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
In December 2004, a massive earthquake struck off Indonesia's Sumatra island and triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people -- 131,000 in Indonesia's Aceh province alone. A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.
