The figures were given on 18 August by Berton SP Panjaitan, acting head of the agency’s data and disaster-communication centre. The earthquake itself struck at 21:58 UTC on 14 August — just before six on Saturday morning local time — with the United States Geological Survey placing its epicentre roughly 68 kilometres north-north-west of Ende at a depth of about ten kilometres. Shallow ruptures of that kind deliver their energy close to the surface, which is why an offshore event has been felt so heavily on land. The agency has logged 2,119 aftershocks since, seventy of them strong enough to be felt, the largest at magnitude 6.2.
What has changed most across the week is not the death toll but the displacement figure, which has climbed from roughly 12,800 at the weekend to more than 40,000. That is the truer measure of this disaster. Deaths were concentrated in the first hours; displacement grows as engineers walk street by street and condemn houses that are still standing but no longer safe to sleep in. Flores is long, mountainous and served by a thin road network, and several affected communities sit on outlying islands, so each additional day of assessment tends to widen the count rather than close it.
Mr Panjaitan advised residents to stay away from cracked and damaged buildings, and said seismic activity was expected to settle only over the coming two to three weeks. The provincial authorities have declared a state of emergency, and the agency reported earlier in the week that around 1,500 military and police personnel and ten aircraft had been committed to the relief effort.
All casualty figures remain provisional, as they always are at this stage.