A tsunami in the south Pacific triggered by a magnitude 8.0 earthquake has devastated coastal villages and killed five people in the Solomon Islands, with concerns for hundreds more in outlying islands.
The centre of the quake was off the Santa Cruz Islands, a cluster of remote islands that form part of the Solomon Islands, north-east of Australia.
Two waves with a height of three feet washed away houses in four villages and left at least five people dead, including three women, a man and a boy believed to be 10 to 12 years old.
Officials said hundreds of people live in the villages but authorities are yet to report from the devastated areas, including the affected villages and some smaller islands.
“At this stage, authorities are still trying to establish the exact number and extent of damage,” said a government spokesman, George Herming. “Communication to Santa Cruz Island is difficult due to the remoteness of the island.”
The hospital at Lata, the main town in the Santa Cruz Islands, has begun receiving casualties and expects more in the coming hours. The town’s main airport was flooded but the town’s 5000 residents were believed to have had enough time to reach higher ground.
“We are yet to receive information from three villages along the coast or other islands in the province,” the hospital’s director of nursing, Augustine Bilve, told The Daily Telegraph.
“Soon after the earthquake we heard the siren for the tsunami. There was no time for people to move to higher ground.”
The quake struck at around midday and prompted the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii to issue a tsunami warning for several Pacific states and a tsunami watch for Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia which was later cancelled. The agency said the quake struck at a depth of almost 18 miles.
The United States Geological Survey recorded at least 23 aftershocks with a magnitude of between 5.0 and 6.6 near the Solomon Islands. A tsunami of around 20 inches reportedly hit New Caledonia and a small wave also hit Japan and Papua New Guinea.
In Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, residents fled to higher ground and spent hours looking out to sea for sign of further waves.
“People are still standing on the hills outside of Honiara just looking out over the water, trying to observe if there is a wave coming in,” Mr Herming said.
In 2007, a tsunami following an 8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 50 people in the Solomon Islands and left thousands homeless.
The nation is in the so-called Ring of Fire – a volatile region that stretches about 25,000 miles around the Pacific Ocean and is subject to almost daily earthquakes and frequent volcanic eruptions.
The interconnected circle of fault lines is positioned on a weak line in the Earth’s crust and has featured most of the deadliest quakes in history, including the 2004 quake in Indonesia that triggered a tsunami which killed more than 220,000 people across the region. Other quakes along the ring’s fault lines include the devastating 2011 tremor off Japan which killed 19,000 people and caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.
Wednesday 6 February 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/solomonislands/9851588/Powerful-Solomon-Islands-earthquake-triggers-small-tsunami.html
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