Small tsunami hits Japan after Pacific quake
Source: Reuters
(Recasts lead, adds details) By Elaine Lies TOKYO, Jan 13 (Reuters) - A small tsunami wave hit Japan's northernmost island on Saturday after a powerful north Pacific earthquake prompted tsunami warnings for northern Japan, Russia and a wide swathe of Japan's Pacific coast. A tsunami watch was also issued for a wide area of the Pacific, including Guam, Taiwan, the Philippines and Hawaii by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, but there were no reports of injury or damage. A 10-cm (4-inch) wave was reported at Nemuro, on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, a little after 3 p.m. local (0600 GMT), NHK public television said. Officials said several harbour waters had drawn back slightly in what could be a precursor to a wave. There were no reports of injury or damage, or more significant waves, as of 3:45 p.m., but officials warned that larger waves could still arrive and evacuation advisories were issued for thousands of households. Japan's Meteorological Agency said that tsunami of as much as a metre in height could strike parts of Hokkaido and that smaller waves were likely to hit a large part of Japan's Pacific coastal areas from Hokkaido to Wakayama prefecture in western Japan on the largest main island of Honshu. The USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) put the quake magnitude at 7.9, a "major" tremor, and said its epicentre was 525 km (325 miles) east northeast of Kuril'sk, Kurile islands, and 1,710 km (1,065 miles) northeast of Tokyo. The same area was struck by a powerful quake in November, prompting evacuations and tsunami warnings, but in the end only small waves -- the highest 40 cm -- reached Japan. EVACUATION ADVISED Hokkaido officials urged residents to move to higher ground, and fire trucks made the rounds of coastal areas warning about the possibility of a tsunami. There was only moderate shaking in Hokkaido and no immediate reports of injury due to the quake. "We have cars going around the city telling people to evacuate," said Takahiro Yamamoto, an official with the Monbetsu city government, told NHK. Television footage showed one worried resident of Kushiro studying the coastline with binoculars from an evacuation centre. An official in the Philippines said they had issued a tsunami alert "level one", which warned residents on the northern and eastern coastlines to wait for further information and possible evacuation. A tsunami, Japanese for "harbour wave," travels at dizzying speed in the open ocean and, when it approaches shallow water along a coast, slows and swells. In an inlet, it can rise to a towering height very quickly. In 1993, a tsunami caused by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed about 200 people on the island of Okushiri, off Hokkaido's southwestern coast.(Additional reporting by Teruaki Ueno, Chikafumi Hodo and Linda Sieg in Tokyo and Rosemarie Francisco in Manila)
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