hehehhe my cousin lives in tofino, he had a hangover to when the siren went 8O
Quake prompts brief tsunami warning for B.C.
CTV.ca News Staff
A major earthquake struck off the coast of northern California on Tuesday, prompting a fleeting but sweeping tsunami warning from the California-Mexico border to Vancouver Island.
No injuries or damages were reported as a result of the 7.0-magnitude quake. But for a short time, it did raise fears of a tsunami.
The quake struck at approximately 7:50 p.m. local time Tuesday, about 145 kilometres southwest of the coastal community of Crescent City, California.
The West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (WCATWC) published a bulletin warning of the possibility the undersea quake could trigger a tsunami.
It was cancelled about an hour after the quake hit.
The mayor of Tofino, B.C., had been preparing to evacuate people from low-lying areas before the tsunami bulletin was cancelled. The area received the bulletin just before 9 p.m. local time.
However, the movement of the earthquake was horizontal, not vertical, which is typically what leads to a tsunami.
"It was a strike slip zone, so luckily no vertical movement of water," said Denny Sinnott, the tidal officer for the Institute of Ocean Sciences.
Once officials noticed that none of the nearby California or Oregon tidal stations had been affected, then the alert was called off, Sinnott told CTV's Canada AM.
"But you don't know that at the time. This location of the plate is not unlike Sumatra in that one plate is going under another," he said.
The Dec. 26 tsunami triggered by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean killed at least 176,000 in Sumatra, Indonesia, and other nearby countries.
It also added to fears of such wave hitting elsewhere, such as British Columbia. And tsunamis are not unheard of in this part of the world.
In the spring of 1964, a magnitude-8.4 quake in Alaska triggered tsunamis that killed more than 120 people. The waves touched British Columbia and the states of Washington, California and Hawaii.
As a result of the December tsunamis, Indonesia will unveil a national tsunami warning system in August.