Qualla: The Third Strike https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:27 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: The Third Strike https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake The Third Strike: Introduction https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake/ Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three weeks of relentless shaking had already hollowed out the northern half of Lombok when the ground lurched again at 10:56 p.m. on August 19, 2018. This was no aftershock. Indonesia's meteorological agency, the BMKG, was emphatic: the magnitude 6.9 tremor was a new mainshock, generated on a separate thrust fault within the same 500-kilometer Flores back-arc system that had been tearing at the island since late July. For the exhausted residents of northeast Lombok and northwest Sumbawa, who had barely begun to process the destruction from the August 5 earthquake that killed over 560 people, the distinction between "aftershock" and "new earthquake" was academic. What mattered was that the walls were falling again.

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Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/qwdb-the-third-strike-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full The Third Strike: A Fault System That Would Not Rest https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake/ Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lombok sits at one of the most tectonically complex intersections on Earth. Here, the Australian plate grinds northward beneath the Sunda plate, and the collision has been shoving the volcanic arc over the back-arc Bali Basin along the Flores Thrust, a zone of fracture stretching...

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Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/qwdb-the-third-strike-a-fault-system-that-would-not-rest.mp3 0:06 2 full The Third Strike: A Community Already on Its Knees https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake/ Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. By mid-August, Lombok was a landscape of blue tarpaulins and broken concrete. Hundreds of thousands of people were living in open fields and makeshift camps. Hospitals had been evacuated; patients were being treated in tents. The communities of Sambelia and Labuhan Lombok on the ...

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Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/qwdb-the-third-strike-a-community-already-on-its-knees.mp3 0:06 3 full The Third Strike: When the Earth Becomes the Enemy https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake/ Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. What made the 2018 Lombok sequence so psychologically devastating was its refusal to end. In most earthquake disasters, there is a main event followed by diminishing aftershocks. People grieve, rebuild, and move forward with some confidence that the worst has passed. Lombok offer...

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]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/qwdb-the-third-strike-when-the-earth-becomes-the-enemy.mp3 0:06 4 full The Third Strike: The Long Shadow of the Flores Thrust https://qualla.com/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake/ Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 2018 Lombok earthquake sequence -- three major events in 22 days -- forced a reckoning with the seismic hazard posed by the Flores back-arc thrust system. Before 2018, the fault zone had produced at least four earthquakes above magnitude 6.5 in the preceding century, includin...

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]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/w/d/b/19-august-2018-lombok-earthquake-wp/qwdb-the-third-strike-the-long-shadow-of-the-flores-thrust.mp3 0:06 5 full