‘Strongest in decades’: Magnitude 8.7 earthquake in Russia sparks 4m-tsunami warnings

A powerful magnitude 8.7 earthquake struck off Russia’s Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula on Wednesday, generating a tsunami of up to 4 metres, prompting evacuations and damaging buildings, officials said.

A Russian official said a tsunami with a wave height of between 3m and 4m was recorded in parts of the Kamchatka region.

The Japanese government raised its tsunami alert and issued an emergency warning It said expected a tsunami was high as 3m to arrive at large coastal areas along the Pacific Ocean.

The US National Tsunami Warning Center, based in Alaska, issued a warning for parts of the Alaska Aleutian Islands, and a watch for portions of the West Coast, including California, Oregon, and Washington, and Hawaii. The advisory also includes a vast swath of Alaska’s coast line.

“Today’s earthquake was serious and the strongest in decades of tremors,” Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app.

He added that according to preliminary information there were no injuries, but a kindergarten was damaged.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was shallow at a depth of 19.3 km, and was centred about 125km east-southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city of 165,000 along the coast of Avacha Bay. It revised the magnitude up from 8.0 earlier.

Russia’s Tass news agency reported that many people in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskyran out into the street without shoes or outerwear. Cabinets toppled inside homes, mirrors were broken, cars swayed in the street and balconies on buildings shook noticeably.

Tass also reported power outages and mobile phone service failures in the capital of the Kamchatka region.

An evacuation order for the small town of Severo-Kurilsk, south of the peninsula, was declared due to the tsunami threat following the earthquake, Sakhalin Governor Valery Limarenko said on Telegram.

The quake was about 250km away from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost of the country’s four big islands, and was felt only slightly, according to Japan’s NHK television.

Japan, part of the area known as the Pacific ring of fire, is one of the world’s most quake-prone country.

In November 1952, a magnitude 9.0 quake in Kamchatka caused damage but no reported deaths despite setting off 9.1-meter waves in Hawaii.

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