The incredibly strong earthquake that struck off the coast of Russia – which caused a tsunami alert to be issued for the Pacific coast – did cause some damage in the sparsely populated region near the epicenter.
KTLA obtained footage taken during the 8.8-magnitude temblor, which struck around 11:30 a.m. local time, from different locales throughout Far Eastern Russia that felt the quake, including a kitchen, a hospital and oceanside bluffs in the isolated Kamchatka Peninsula region.
Video taken by a resident of the small town of Severo-Kurilsk shows roughly 40 seconds of violent shaking in their home’s kitchen. All of the town’s roughly 2,400 residents were evacuated, according to local media reports.
While not much damage was reported in the area, a kindergarten building in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky did partially collapse, footage shows. The building was unoccupied at the time the quake struck.
Further footage posted by a local health official shows surgeons at Kamchatka Oncology Center – located in the region’s largest city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – holding the body of a patient down while they were performing an operation.
Another video shows that part of a bluff on the Pacific Ocean collapsed into the water, sending a dust cloud into the sky.
Major flooding was seen in Severo-Kurilsk, where the town’s port and several buildings were damaged. A total of four waves passed through the town, local media outlets said.
Elsewhere in the region, two million people in Japan were told to evacuate after the quake. Traffic jams were seen as many scrambled to get to higher ground; the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which was affected heavily by the 9.0-magnitude quake that struck Japan in 2011, was temporarily evacuated as a precaution.
Tsunami waves did reach the Japanese coast, but they were smaller than expected. No significant damage was reported there.
Further away, gridlock was also seen in Hawaii as tsunami sirens blared and people rushed away from the coast. Advisories for all the Hawaiian Islands were lifted by Wednesday morning.
The quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, hit at 4:25 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time at a depth of around 11 miles, some 80 miles southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatksky, and was one of the strongest ever recorded. Several large aftershocks were recorded after the initial quake, but despite tsunami waves that hit Japan and moved across the Pacific that prompted evacuations in Hawaii and heightened warnings in Northern California, there were no reports of substantial damage.
Just before 1 a.m. Wednesday, officials with the National Weather Service reported that the tsunami had reached the Northern California coastline and was showing up in the Arena Cove tide gauge as it continued its path southward. Along the Southern California coastline, where an initial “Tsunami Watch” was upgraded to a “Tsunami Advisory” just after 7 p.m., NWS appeared most concerned about areas north of Point Conception.
The tsunami advisory was expected to remain in place until Saturday due to the threat of strong currents and waves, but was canceled by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials on Wednesday morning.
Only small swells were seen in SoCal on Wednesday, a welcome sight for all.
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