The National Weather Service issued an upgraded tsunami warning Tuesday night for an 100-mile stretch of Northern California’s coastline between Cape Mendocino and the border with Oregon after a rare 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck of Russia’s eastern coast.
Officials warned that waves of up to 5 feet high were expected to reach the coast at Crescent City in Northern California, about 20 miles south of the Oregon border, just before midnight Pacific time. The Weather Service urged residents in the warning zone to move inland away from coastal areas.
That stretch of the Northern California coastline has had frequent experiences with tsunamis over the past century. A tsunami warning means that dangerous coastal flooding and powerful current are possible and may continue for several hours or days.
Crescent City, which has a population of under 7,000, was particularly vulnerable to tsunamis because of its low elevation on land that juts out into the sea. It has been hit by 32 tsunamis since 1933. Five of them caused damage, according to a city website, and the one that hit in 1964 was devastating, killing 11 people and destroying 29 city blocks, a county website states.
Lori Dengler, an emeritus professor of geology at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, said that the city was in the process of “an orderly evacuation of the commercial fishing fleet” on Tuesday evening.
Nearly the entire rest of the West Coast is under a tsunami advisory, a lower alert level, meaning that flooding of beaches and harbor areas was possible but widespread inundation was not expected.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
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