A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck off the Solomon Islands yesterday, rocking the capital Honiara, but there was no Pacific-wide tsunami in the tremor-prone region, officials said.
The shallow undersea earthquake was centered 214km west of Honiara, the US Geological Survey said.
“We felt it and we got a bit dizzy,” a worker from Honiara’s Iron Bottom Sound Hotel, who did not want to give her name, told reporters.
Solomon Islands’ National Disaster Management Office director Loti Yates said threat analysis had determined the earthquake would not generate a tsunami but he was waiting to hear back that remote islands had escaped damage.
“It’s shallow and that’s always cause for concern,” Yates said.
“Earthquakes can cause underwater slips that can generate a tsunami,” he said, adding that he would have expected to have already heard had there been serious damage.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which also measured the earthquake at 6.9, had earlier said “a destructive Pacific-wide tsunami is not expected.”
Australian officials estimated the earthquake at magnitude 6.8 and said it would have been felt across hundreds of kilometers.
“They would definitely have felt it over quite a wide area,” Geoscience Australia’s duty seismologist Hugh Glanville said. “But there shouldn’t be a tsunami and hopefully not too much damage.”
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