A tsunami alert was triggered Monday in Alaska following a 7.5 magnitude earthquake off the coast of this American state, but no large-scale phenomenon had been observed at the end of the day.
The tremor, initially rated at 7.4, was recorded 91 km southeast of Sand Point, in the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea, about 40 km deep, the US Geophysical Institute said. (USGS).
It was in this small town that the largest waves were reported, around two feet high.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center subsequently indicated that areas potentially affected by the phenomenon were not exposed to “large-scale flooding”.
The tsunami alert affected the state’s south coast as well as the Alaska Peninsula, but spared Anchorage, the state’s largest city, located nearly a thousand kilometers from the epicenter.
The earthquake itself did not cause any known casualties or major damage, in a very isolated and sparsely populated area.
It was felt in King Cove, about 100 kilometers west of Sand Point, but no damage was seen, Gary Hennigh, the manager of the small town, told Anchorage Daily News site, whose ” inhabitants and workers of the cannery “had found refuge on the heights, he explained.
“It rocked a lot, I can’t tell you how long it lasted, maybe 15 to 30 seconds,” added Michael Ashley of Cold Bay. “All the sofas, armchairs and shelves were moving”.
The main tremor was followed by several aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater.
Alaska is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a very active area for earthquakes, which stretches from the Gulf of Alaska to the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka.
On March 27, 1964, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake, the most violent ever recorded in the United States and the world, struck the Anchorage region. It had lasted several minutes and caused a destructive tidal wave across the entire West American coast, killing more than 250 people in total.