Tsunami waves hit Russia but residents calm

MOSCOW : Tsunami waves measuring up to 80 centimetres hit Russia's Pacific coast on Sunday after the Chile earthquake, but there was little sign of panic or damage in the largely uninhabited region, officials said.

The highest wave of 80 centimetres (30 inches) was recorded on the southeast of the Kamchatka peninsula, the Tsunami Centre on Russia's Pacific island of Sakhalin said, while waves also hit the Kuril islands chain.

"This is the eighth wave that has hit the (Kamchatka) peninsula, there will be others," a spokeswoman for the centre was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russia issued a tsunami warning after Saturday's massive earthquake in Chile and launched evacuation procedures in areas of Kamchatka and the Kuril islands amid warnings the waves could reach up to two metres.

It later cancelled the warning on Kamchatka, RIA Novosti reported, although it was not immediately clear if the alert remained in place for the Kuril islands.

With the wave heights so far lower than feared and the remote area far from major population centres, evacuations were largely small in scale and there were no reports of damage.

Some 100 employees of the port and fish factory on the island of Severo-Kurilsk were evacuated, and residents of five houses that could be struck by the tsunami would be transported to safe areas, officials said.

"Even on the Kuril islands, where there has been evacuation, there has been no panic," an official for the Far East branch of the emergency situations ministry told RIA Novosti.

"People are relating to the requests to evacuate to higher ground with understanding," the official added. The Sakhalin Tsunami centre said the waves hitting the Kuril islands had so far reached only 10 centimetres (four inches).

Reports said that inhabitants of the main city on Kamchatka, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, were taking their usual Sunday excursions to go fishing or walk on the flanks of the local volcanoes.

The Kuril islands, which lie north of Japan's Hokkaido island, have been controlled by Moscow since they were seized by Soviet troops in 1945 but are claimed by Japan and their status still harms Moscow-Tokyo relations.

The 8.8-magnitude quake that struck off the coast of Chile before dawn on Saturday killed more than 300 people and affected as many as two million as it left a trail of destruction through a swathe of central Chile.

One of the largest earthquakes on record, it sent tsunami waves crashing into coastal areas of the South American nation of 16 million people, and then roaring across the Pacific Ocean as far as New Zealand and Japan. - AFP/ms

Source:channelnewsasia.com/