30 September 2009

Tsunami

The first thing I heard this morning when I got to work was that there had been a massive earthquake and tsunami in Samoa - the earthquake (8.3 on the Richter scale) was not far offshore on the edge of the Kermadec Trench, and there was a massive wave that has wiped out a huge amount of land. There were fears that the tsunami would come here but we seem to have escaped it. There was a 40cm wave on East Cape but that was about it - nothing like the metres of wave they had in Apia. They don't know how many people are dead yet, but it's at least 100 and that number is only going to rise. They had no warning: the earthquake happened and then minutes later they were smashed by the waves.

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