BREAKING: 8.0 Earthquake Triggers Tsunami in S. Pacific

[Synthaholic]

Powerful quake in South Pacific triggers 3-foot tsunami - World News


Powerful quake in South Pacific triggers 3-foot tsunami

By Becky Bratu, Staff Writer, NBC News


A 3-foot tsunami was generated after a strong earthquake shook the islands in the South Pacific, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.


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The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake -- with a preliminary magnitude of 8.0 -- struck Wednesday in the Santa Cruz Islands at a depth of about 3 miles. The Santa Cruz Islands are scarcely populated and are part of the Solomon Islands.


A magnitude 6.4 aftershock occurred shortly after the first rumble, followed by a 6.6 one later. USGS officials said that was "not at all surprising."


Hotel workers on Vanuatu said they felt the earthquake but have not heard of any damage or injuries. An employee who can see the coast from a hotel said he had not noticed any water coming in.


The tsunami warning was in effect for the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, Kosrae, Fiji, Kiribati, Wallis and Futana. A tsunami watch was in effect for Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and Guam.

 

[waltky]

Lucky it hit in a remote region...

Magnitude 8.2 earthquake hits Russia
Sat, May 25, 2013 - SHAKEN TO THE CORE: Following the quake, which was felt across the continent, Russia issued a tsunami warning, but then lifted it with no reports of casualties

A massive undersea earthquake yesterday in Russia’s far east prompted a tsunami warning and was felt in cities including Moscow far to the west, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the quake at magnitude 8.2 and placed its epicenter in the Sea of Okhotsk off the shore of the Kamchatka Peninsula at a depth of more than 600km. Russia rapidly issued a tsunami warning for Sakhalin Island and its region, urging residents to seek higher ground. However, the warning was then lifted with no reports of casualties.

The huge magnitude and great depth of the quake meant that its echoes were felt across the Eurasian continent, including in the Russian capital itself. “There were repercussions of the quake in Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow and Europe, in particular Romania. Practically the whole continent shook,” Anatoly Tsygankov of the state Rosgidromet environmental monitoring service told the Interfax news agency. According to the RIA Novosti news agency, the earthquake was also felt across Russia’s Far East and Siberia, including big cities like Krasnoyarsk and Blagoveshchensk.

The emergencies ministry in Moscow, which is eight time zones away from the region hit by the quake, said it had received reports early yesterday morning of phenomena like chandeliers shaking and turbulence in aquarium water as a result of the quake. “Moscow is part of the zone where possible repercussions from earthquakes can be felt. It’s not dangerous, but important, for example, for standard construction,” Arkady Tishkov of the Geography Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences told Interfax. However, he said that the last time this happened in Moscow was 30 years ago.

A 21-story office building in Saint Petersburg was evacuated after the people working there felt the building shaking, Fontanka.ru city news Web site reported. The waves from such a quake travel deep beneath Earth’s surface, said Alexei Lyubushin, chief researcher of the Institute of Physics of the Earth at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “If an earthquake happens at such a low depth, the waves move along low layers, practically the mantle,” he told Kommersant FM radio. “The waves can even move through the Earth’s core,” he added.

Magnitude 8.2 earthquake hits Russia - Taipei Times

 

[waltky]

Mebbe dat's the debris floatin' inna Pacific Ocean?...

10 years on, where did all the tsunami debris go?
Dec 21,`14-- Cars. Fishing boats. Houses. Entire villages. The 2004 tsunami left Banda Aceh with mountains of debris up to 6 kilometers (4 miles) inland.

Driving in the remade communities today, it's easy to wonder where it all went. Some of it is still there - recycled into road materials, buildings and furniture. Some of it was burned, creating new environmental hazards. And most of it was simply washed out to sea. Ten years after that gigantic wave engulfed this city of 4 million on the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island on the day after Christmas, Banda Aceh has been almost totally restored. The tangled mountains of rubbish are gone, and it's hard to imagine the destruction that once choked rivers, blocked streets and ripped up trees by the roots. The endless heaps of twisted metal, splintered wood and broken concrete have all disappeared except for some scattered reminders for tourists and local residents. A drive along the coast highlights a stunning coastline with new houses perched near the beach. Lush mangroves have been planted to help withstand future tsunamis, fishermen are back at sea and farmers are again working their rice paddies.

Still, authorities are concerned about the health and environmental risks posed by debris contaminated by oil, asbestos and medical waste sitting on the seafloor off the coast and in 32 unregulated dump sites around the city. "Unsafe disposal of waste will cause further environmental damage in the long term," said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who headed the Aceh and Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, which led the massive clean-up effort and was dissolved in 2009 after the job was judged finished. Banda Aceh was the hardest hit city by the disaster, which devastated hundreds of communities in more than a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean. The tsunami left an estimated 10 million cubic meters (13 million cubic yards) of debris here, most of it washed into the ocean, Mangkusubroto said. If all that was squeezed into a 1-hectare (2 1/2 acre) field, it would create a tower of trash 1,000 meters (3,000 feet) tall. Cleaning up the wrecked city was a mammoth, often overwhelming, task.

For weeks, the streets were strewn with rubble, and rescue workers retrieved dead bodies from under houses and in ponds, said Abdul Mutalib Ahmad, who worked at Banda Aceh's only landfill and witnessed the tsunami from atop a three-story building. "Debris was everywhere," he said. "We thought we were facing severe public health problem with the massive amount of waste." At first, many survivors simply burned wood and other garbage. But authorities discouraged them from doing that because it polluted the air and could expose them to harmful toxins that might lead to respiratory problems. Some trash was covered with oil or chemicals, making it extremely flammable and hazardous, and in at least one case, a fire spread uncontrollably over a large area. As key roads were cleared, trucks began carting tons of debris to the landfill every day for at least a year, Ahmad said.

Motorists ride through debris on a street in Banda Aceh, Aceh province, Indonesia. Ten years after that gigantic wave swept into this city of 4 million on the day after Christmas, Banda Aceh has been almost totally restored. The tangled mountains of rubbish are gone, and it's hard to imagine the destruction that once choked rivers, blocked streets and ripped up trees by the roots.

But some waste inevitably got dumped at random sites around the city. They still contain leaky oil drums and asbestos-laced housing materials. Hazardous waste that was found among the rubble was buried in a separate marked area inside the city's landfill, according to Tomi Soetjipto, the Indonesia spokesman for the U.N. Development Program, which oversaw much of the clean-up. And nearly 50 tons of expired medications - some of it donated after the tsunami - sit in a warehouse awaiting safe disposal. Three months after the tsunami, the UNDP started a $40.5 million recycling program that employed 400,000 temporary workers to pluck wood and stone from the rubble and use the materials to rebuild roads and houses as well as to make furniture. The recycled waste was used to reconstruct 100 kilometers (62 miles) of roads and manufacture 12,000 pieces of wooden furniture, Mangkusubroto said.

The UNDP's Tsunami Recovery Waste Management Project cleared about 1 million cubic meters (1.3 million cubic yards) of debris from the city, enough to fill 400 Olympic swimming pools. It also trained about 1,300 government workers in overseeing the program. Some 67,000 metric tons of other recyclable materials such as glass, plastic and cardboard were diverted from landfills and sold in local markets. Indonesian authorities say the clean-up was possible only with the help of the international community. "Finally, the mounting tsunami rubbish was cleared. For such a huge job like that, the world didn't leave us alone to face it," Mangkusubroto said.

News from The Associated Press

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Tsunami warning system still not in place
Mon, Dec 22, 2014 - In April 2012, Indonesia’s Banda Aceh, the city worst hit by the tsunami that killed at least 226,000 people on Dec. 26, 2004, received a terrifying reminder of how unprepared it was for the next disaster.

As a magnitude 8.6 earthquake struck at sea, thousands of residents shunned purpose-built shelters and fled by car and motorcycle, clogging streets with traffic. A network of powerful warning sirens stayed silent. No wave came. However, if it had, the damage would have been “worse than 2004, if it was the same magnitude of tsunami,” Bandung Institute of Technology’s Harkunti Rahayu said. As the 10th anniversary of the disaster approaches, experts and officials say weaknesses remain across the region in a system designed to warn people and get them to safety. For millions of people living in coastal areas, warnings do not always get through, thanks to bureaucratic confusion and geography. The most vulnerable areas lack infrastructure and many people do not have basic knowledge about how to keep safe from deadly waves.

Since the disaster, a sophisticated early warning system has been constructed from next to nothing, costing more than US$400 million and encompassing 28 countries. With 101 sea-level gauges, 148 seismometers and nine buoys, the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System can send alerts to countries’ tsunami warning centers within 10 minutes of a quake, said Tony Elliott, the head of the UNESCO secretariat that oversees the system. However, there has also been mismanagement and waste. In Indonesia, a German-funded detection initiative built an expensive network of buoys — and then scrapped them — after reports of cost overruns and signs they were ineffective. All but one of nine Indonesian-operated buoys has been lost or damaged by fishermen, Indonesia’s Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology official Velly Asvaliantina said. The remaining buoy is not operational, she said.

Visitors photograph the names of people who died in the 2004 tsunami at the tsunami museum in Banda Aceh, Indonesia

Elliott said technological advances mean the lack of buoys is not a significant impediment in tsunami detection. A far bigger concern is getting warnings to at-risk coastal communities, and making sure people get to safety in time. In some of the countries worst affected in 2004 — Thailand, Indonesia and India — much progress has been made, officials said. However, concerns remain about this final, crucial stage. The 2012 failure in Aceh prompted a reassessment in Thailand, where 5,395 people died in 2004, Thai National Disaster Warning Center head Somsak Khaosuwan said. “We put our systems to the test each day. Our warning system is one of the best in the world, but I must admit we lack maintenance,” he said.

Former agency head Samit Thammasarot, who was ousted from his position following a 2006 coup against then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was more damning. “If a tsunami happened today, would we be prepared? No, we would not,” Samit told reporters. “On an official level there has been, in the past, corruption and cut-price equipment bought that does not meet international standards.” In India, the new system struggles to communicate alerts by fax, text message and e-mail to remote locations, Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services official Ajay Kumar said. “Some of the people, officials, are not getting the alert,” he said. “Secondly, one thing that has come out from the drills is that the last mile connectivity is still missing. If [a] tsunami is coming, even now people don’t know what is to be done, where to move.”

Tsunami warning system still not in place - Taipei Times