From Japan to the USA, from China to Mexico and Peru, many countries on the Pacific coasts have lived a day of fear pending a possible disastrous tsunami after a very powerful earthquake off the Kamchantka, in the Far Russian East, with a magnitude of 8.8, the highest recorded in the last 73 years in the queen and among the ten strongest ever in the world. At the moment the budget is very low compared to the initial fears: an unknown number of wounded in Russia and no serious damage. But after the earthquake, an eruption of a Kamchatka volcano, Klyuchevskoy, began.
“Thank God there were no victims,” said the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, underlining that “all alarm systems” worked correctly. But to avoid a budget of tragic size, the fact that this region of Russia is very scarcely populated has contributed. The alarm went off when in Moscow and Europe it was full night. The USGS Geophysical Institute Usgs has located the epicenter of the earthquake 136 kilometers east of Petropavlovsk, the capital of the Kamchatka peninsula, at a depth of 19 kilometers under the Pacific waters.
A region located about 7,000 kilometers east of Moscow and closer geographically to the American coast of Alaska. The USGS immediately launched the tsunami alarm for Alaska, Japan and Hawaii, as well as for Russia. “You are strong and you are safe!” The American president Donald Trump wrote on his social truth. But little by little messages to the population to keep away from the coasts were issued by the authorities of many other countries, from China to the Philippines, to Peru, to Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador.
The first anomalous waves hit the Russian coasts reaching a height of up to five meters, according to local authorities. In particular, the port of Severo-Kurilsk, a location with about 2,000 residents on the island of Paramushir, in the north of the Kurili archipelago, in front of the southern tip of Kamchatka. The roads and a factory for fish processing have been flooded, but the local authorities said there was time to evacuate all the inhabitants on the nearby hills. As for the consequences of the earthquake, after inspections that lasted throughout the day, the Russian Ministry of Emergencies said that no “significant damage has been verified and the structures resisted the shock”.
The only damaged building seriously was that of a nursery school that was empty because renovation works are underway, where a part of the facade collapsed. The Ministry of Health of Kamchatka, however, said that several people asked for medical assistance for light injuries. The first strong shock was followed by dozens of others of settlement, with a magnitude up to 6.9.
A tsunami with waves up to 1.3 meters was recorded in Japan in a port in the prefecture of Miyagi, in the north of the country. The workers engaged in the dismantling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were also evacuated, in the north-western region of Tohoku, theater of the nuclear accident in March 2011 caused by an earthquake with consequent tsunami.
While the Pacific Tsunami Alert Center announced that the highest wave recorded in Hawaii was 1.21 meters and hit the coast of the city of Haleiwa, in the Honolulu County. The Russian media have released video of the moments of the earthquake showing furniture and falling into the houses and parked cars oscillately oscillately, while passers -by spread on the ground.
In images taken from a closed circuit camera, the components of a surgical team that keep the patient during an operation are seen, waiting for the shock to end. The governor of Kamchatka, Vladimir SoloDov, said that he will propose to award doctors and nurses of state honors because “such a courage deserves the highest recognition”. A few hours after the earthquake, the Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences announced that the Kyuchevskoi volcano, 4,850 meters high, entered eruption, located 360 kilometers from PetropaVlovsk.