SAN FRANCISCO — It was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, a magnitude 8.8 monster off the eastern coast of Russia.
Despite its remote location, the size of the quake immediately brought potential danger of tsunami to a significant swath of the globe, including Japan, Canada and the United States. Tsunami alerts immediately went out, covering millions of people, including the entire U.S. West Coast.
But for all its fury, the quake ended up not being a catastrophe. Dangerous waves that rose more than 10 feet never materialized outside of Russia, and even there, officials had no reports of deaths, and damage appeared to be limited.
“In this case, we mostly dodged a bullet,” said Mike Rademaker, harbormaster for the Crescent City Harbor, a place that saw deadly tsunamis both in 1964 with the Alaska mega-quake and 2011 when the great Japanese quake hit.
While those events represent worst-case scenarios, Tuesday’s temblor represents a best-case scenario.
“With tsunamis, location and directionality is everything,” said Nathan Wood, a tsunami scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The area near the epicenter off Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula did see damage, but it was sparsely populated. Video of the town of Severo-Kurilsk, on an island just off the peninsula, showed a building being swept away.
But for areas farther out, initial modeling suggests the tsunami’s energy was directed into the open Pacific Ocean, roughly between Alaska and Hawaii, and had time to weaken before it hit more populated areas.
“It just kind of shot right between the two of those (states),” Wood said.
The tsunami “impacted the local community that was right next to the source (earthquake) where it happened,” Wood said. “But for everyone else, it kind of just shot right down this empty hallway — in between the Aleutian Islands chain and the Hawaiian Islands — and so there wasn’t really a whole lot in its way.
“So by the time it got to the West Coast, like California, Oregon, a lot of the energy had been dissipated,” Wood said.
Russia saw tsunami waves as high as 16 feet, according to news wire reports, but tsunami heights maxed out at 4 feet in Crescent City, 3 feet in Arena Cove in Mendocino County, 2.7 feet at Port San Luis in San Luis Obispo County, 2.6 feet at Point Reyes in Marin County and 1.5 feet in Monterey. The totals were even smaller in Southern California.
The highest wave in the U.S. was 5.7 feet in Kahului, Hawaii, on Maui.
“It’s a relatively good day,” state Sen. Mike McGuire, who represents a large swath of the Northern California coast, said Wednesday.
The extensive alerts issued after the earthquake struck at 6:25 p.m. Tuesday CDT sparked concern across the Pacific, as scientists raced to forecast how extensive the tsunami could be. A magnitude 8.8 quake ranks as the sixth most powerful earthquake on record in the last 125 years.
But by Tuesday evening, the National Tsunami Warning Center’s forecasts indicated that Crescent City would see a tsunami that would likely cap out at no more than 5 feet, and with places like San Francisco and Los Angeles harbor at less than 1 foot or so.
