Quake triggers tsunami
HONIARA, Solomon Islands – A powerful undersea earthquake in the South Pacific sent a tsunami several yards high crashing into the Solomon Islands today, devastating at least one village, officials and residents said.
Police and residents said a wave about 10 feet high struck the western town of Gizo, inundating buildings and causing widespread destruction. A man who answered the telephone at the Gizo police station said there were initial reports that eight people, six of them children, had been killed by the tsunami but they were still unconfirmed.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake measured magnitude-8.0 and struck at 7:39 a.m. about six miles beneath the sea floor, 217 miles northwest of the capital, Honiara.
The Pacific region from Australia to Hawaii went on high alert for several hours after the quake struck between the islands of Bougainville and New Georgia, though officials canceled a regionwide tsunami warning after the danger period passed.
Gizo, a regional center, is 25 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter.
Dive shop owner Danny Kennedy estimated the height of the wave at 10 feet.
“We’re just trying to mobilize water and food, and shelter for people at the moment because … in the town alone there’s going to be between 2,000-3,000 homeless,” he said. “It’s not a very good scene at the moment.”
Julian McLeod of the Solomon Islands National Disaster Management Office said there were unconfirmed reports that two villages in the country’s far west were flooded.
“Two villages were reported to have been completely inundated,” McLeod told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. “We have received reports of four people missing.”
A town in the west, Munda, was believed to be badly damaged, officials and the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corp. said, but communications were difficult and details were not confirmed.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center reported the quake at magnitude 8.1, and said a temblor of that strength could cause a destructive tsunami and issued a warning bulletin for the Solomon Islands and neighboring Papua New Guinea.
It ordered a lower-level “tsunami watch” for other places, including most South Pacific countries, but later canceled the alert. The center said a 6-inch wave had been reported in Honiara.