It was the worst earthquake to hit Russia’s Far East in decades, unleashing huge waves in the Pacific Ocean and setting off tsunami warnings across the world.
The quake had a magnitude of 8.8 and powerful aftershocks that rattled local residents. But the damage reported across the sparsely populated Kamchatka Peninsula and in the Kuril Islands nearby was relatively minor.
Some of the tsunami waves that the earthquake generated were as high as 19 feet, the RIA Novosti news agency said, citing Russia’s state Institute of Oceanology.
A local port was flooded and ceiling panels fell at a terminal building of a regional airport, injuring one woman, the regional emergency authority said.
The local health ministry told Interfax, a Russian news agency, that some people were injured but that there were “no serious traumas.”
Medical workers at a cancer center in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the regional capital, were operating when the earthquake hit, Oleg S. Melnikov, a local health care official, said. They scrambled to keep their patient safe as the operating theater’s walls shook, he said.
Videos posted online by residents and regional authorities showed buildings shaking. The extent of the damage remained unclear, though, and the local governor said a solid assessment would take a week.
The region’s Soviet-era houses typically have only a few stories, and many houses are fortified with metal rods designed to withstand the tremors common in the region, which most likely contributed to the lack of major damage.
The vast Kamchatka Peninsula is one of the most remote regions in Russia and is a sought-after tourist destination thanks to its lush nature, plentiful fish and active volcanoes. Surfing is popular along its long coast.
Its landmass is home to just under 300,000 people, mostly concentrated in three towns in the south, including Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Moving around Kamchatka is difficult: The peninsula has just a few hundred miles of paved roads, mostly around towns, and there are no roads to cross the swampland separating it from the mainland.
The earthquake struck under the sea at 11:24 p.m. local time on Tuesday, about 80 miles from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, according to the United States Geological Survey. Local officials soon posted tsunami warnings for Kamchatka and nearby areas like Severo-Kurilsk, on the island of Paramushir.
Videos posted by the Kamchatka branch of the Russian geophysics service showed seawater flooding coastal buildings near Severo-Kurilsk.
Aleksandr Ovsyannikov, the head of Severo-Kurilsk municipality, said that four tsunami waves had hit the town, with some reaching 650 feet inland. He also told Interfax that the waves had flooded the port and pushed some ships into the open sea.
The agency that tracks earthquakes and tsunamis in the region said that the quake was the biggest in the area since 1952 and that “a strong aftershock process” was underway. “Without a doubt, this is an extraordinary event,” it said.
In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a kindergarten was among the structures damaged by the quake. Sergei Lebedev, Kamchatka’s minister for emergency situations, said no one was injured, as the kindergarten was empty when the earthquake hit.
Around 60 surfers were evacuated from a beach, emergency authorities said.
Kamchatka authorities advised businesses to close from 1 p.m. local time, an hour and a half after the earthquake. They also closed volcanic parks and trekking routes in the peninsula’s southern tip for the next five days, citing ongoing seismic activity. Kamchatka has more than 100 active volcanoes that are part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”
Several local tour guides on Wednesday morning posted videos from campsites or bungalows shaken by the earthquake.
A guide in the Kuril Islands, Yelena Kotenko, posted a video of screaming tourists running from a two-story building as bricks rained down.
“We were sitting having breakfast when the ground started shaking,” Ms. Kotenko said. “It happens all the time, but then there was this big jolt and we ran out.”
“An earthquake is nothing special to me, but this was the first time in 37 years of my life that I felt as if I was about to get knocked off my feet.”
She and her husband went to higher ground and stayed there for a few hours before going back to the town. The power supply, which was disrupted for a few hours, was later restored, and shops opened again.
The earthquake caught Aleksei Leshchev, a 33-year-old owner of a surfing camp, in his fourth-floor apartment in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as he was cooking breakfast. He went outside to a parking lot with his girlfriend to ride out the aftershocks.
“It felt as if the building and the entire city would collapse,” he said. “I haven’t felt like this before.”
About 12 hours after the earthquake hit, Mr. Leshchev and his girlfriend returned to the beach for the night. He said he felt safer there than in his fourth-floor apartment.
“If there’s another powerful earthquake, we’ll have about 30 to 40 minutes,” he said, thinking about the tsunami that could follow. “But if our apartment building collapses, there will be nothing we can do.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London, Jiawei Wang from Seoul and Milana Mazaeva from Tbilisi, Georgia.
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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