Tsunami hits Samoan islands hard

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This article was published 30/09/2009 (5935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PAGO PAGO — A powerful Pacific Ocean earthquake spawned towering tsunami waves that swept ashore on Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday, flattening villages, killing at least 39 people and leaving dozens of workers missing at devastated National Park Service facilities.

Cars and people were swept out to sea by the fast-churning water as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Signs of devastation were everywhere, with a giant boat getting washed ashore and coming to rest on the edge of a highway and floodwaters swallowing up cars and homes.

American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono said at least 50 were injured, in addition to the deaths.

Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage. But the death toll seemed sure to rise, with dead bodies already piling up at a hospital in Samoa.

The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about 32 kilometres below the ocean floor, 190 kilometres from American Samoa, a U.S. territory home to 65,000 people.

The territory is home to a U.S. National Park that appeared especially hard-hit. Holly Bundock, spokeswoman for the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region in Oakland, California, said the superintendent of the park and another staffers had been able to locate only a fifth of the park’s 13 to 15 employees and 30 to 50 volunteers.

Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying four tsunami waves four and a half to six metres high roared ashore soon afterward, reaching up to 1.6 kilometres inland.

Residents in both Samoa and American Samoa reported being shaken awake by the quake, which lasted two to three minutes. The initial quake was followed by at least three aftershocks of at least 5.6 magnitude.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a general alert from American Samoa to New Zealand; Tonga suffered some coastal damage from four-metre waves.

Mase Akapo, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in American Samoa, said at least 19 people were killed in four different villages on the main island of Tutuila.

In neighbouring Samoa, an Associated Press reporter saw the bodies of about 20 victims in a hospital at Lalomanu town on the south coast of the main island of Upolu, and said the surrounding tourist coast had been devastated. At least three villages were flattened.

An unspecified number of fatalities and injuries were reported in the Samoan village of Talamoa.

The Samoan capital was virtually deserted with schools and businesses closed. Local media said they had reports of landslides in the Solosolo region of the main Samoan island of Upolu and damage to plantations in the countryside outside Apia.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was deploying teams to American Samoa to provide support and assess damage.

The ramifications of the tsunami could be felt thousands of kilometres away, with federal officials saying strong currents and dangerous waves were forecast from California to Washington state. No major flooding was expected, however.

While the earthquake and tsunami were big, they were not on the same scale of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed more than 150,000 across Asia the day after Christmas in 2004, said tsunami expert Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey in Seattle.

— The Associated Press