A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake has triggered a series of tsunami warnings and evacuation orders stretching across Japan, the US west coast and parts of the Pacific, after the shallow quake hit near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on Wednesday, with reports of waves up to four metres high in the remote region.
The earthquake, one of the strongest ever recorded, struck at a depth of 19.3km (12 miles) and was centred 126km (80 miles) south-east of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city along Russia’s Avacha Bay, the US Geological Survey said.
A tsunami with a height of 3 to 4 metres was recorded in parts of Kamchatka, Sergei Lebedev, regional minister for emergency situations said, with several injured.
“Unfortunately, there are some people injured during the seismic event. Some were hurt while running outside, and one patient jumped out of a window. A woman was also injured inside the new airport terminal,” Oleg Melnikov, regional health minister, told Russia’s TASS state news agency.
“All patients are currently in satisfactory condition, and no serious injuries have been reported so far,” he added.
Kamchatka governor Vladimir Solodov described the quake in a post on Telegram as “serious and the strongest in decades of tremors”. A kindergarten in the area had also been damaged, he said.
The US Tsunami Warning System issued a warning of “hazardous tsunami waves” within the next three hours along some coasts of Russia, Japan, Alaska and Hawaii. A tsunami watch was also in effect for the US island territory of Guam and Micronesia. The US Tsunami Warning Center said waves as high as 3 metres could also hit Ecuador, while sirens blared in Hawaii warning people to leave coastal areas.
In Japan, much of the country’s eastern seaboard – devastated by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in 2011 – was ordered to evacuate. Officials said more than 900,000 residents in 133 municipalities along Japan’s Pacific coast were under evacuation orders.
“Those near the coast should evacuate immediately to higher ground or safe buildings in the areas covered by the tsunami warning from Hokkaido to Wakayama Prefecture [hundreds of kilometres to the south],” said Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, “Please be aware that after the initial wave, second and third waves of tsunamis can be even higher.”
The Japan Weather Agency upgraded its warning, saying it expected tsunami waves of up to 3m, but only waves of 40cm have been recorded so far.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said a tsunami as high as 40cm had been detected in 16 locations as the waves moved south along the Pacific coast from Hokkaido to just northeast of Tokyo. Officials urged caution, saying that bigger waves could come later.
Workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which went into meltdown after being hit by the 2011 tsunami, have been evacuated, although no abnormalities have been observed at the site.
Wednesday’s quake struck about 250km (160 miles) away from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost of the country’s four big islands, and was felt only slightly, according to Japan’s NHK television.
Factory workers and residents in Japan’s northern Hokkaido evacuated to a hill overlooking the ocean, footage from broadcaster TBS showed.
“Please evacuate quickly. If you can move quickly to higher ground and away from the coast,” a newscaster on Japanese public broadcaster NHK said.
The National Tsunami Warning Center, based in Alaska, issued a tsunami 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, including parts of the panhandle.
A University of Tokyo seismologist Shinichi Sakai told NHK that a distant earthquake could cause a tsunami that affects Japan if its epicentre is shallow.
Kamchatka and Russia’s Far East sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geologically active region that is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Japan, also part of the active seismic zone, is one of the world’s most quake-prone countries.
Earlier in July, five powerful quakes – the largest with a magnitude of 7.4 – struck in the sea near Kamchatka. The largest quake was at a depth of 20km and was 144km (89 miles) east of the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which has a population of 180,000.
On 4 November 1952, a magnitude 9.0 quake in Kamchatka caused damage but no reported deaths despite setting off 9.1m (30-foot) waves in Hawaii.
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