Massive earthquake hits Chile, 122 dead
By Alonso Soto Alonso Soto 28 mins ago

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A huge magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early on Saturday, killing at least 122 people, knocking down homes and hospitals, and triggering a tsunami that rolled menacingly across the Pacific.

Buildings caught fire, major highway bridges collapsed and wide cracks opened up in streets. A 15-storey building collapsed in the city of Concepcion, near the epicenter, and overturned cars lay scattered below a fallen overpass in the capital.

Chilean President-elect Sebastian Pinera said at least 122 people had died in the quake, which struck at 3:34 a.m. (0634 GMT), sending many people rushing outside in their pajamas.

“Unfortunately, Chile is a country of catastrophes,” Pinera said, adding the quake dealt a heavy blow to the country’s roads, airports and ports.

He said the death toll could still rise, but an emergency official said it was unlikely to increase dramatically.

Tsunami warnings were posted around the Pacific, including the U.S. state of Hawaii, Japan and Russia.

Telephone and power lines were down across large swathes of central Chile, making it difficult to assess the full extent of the damage close to the epicenter.

The South American country is the world’s No. 1 copper producer, and the quake halted operations at two major mines.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 70 miles northeast of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles.

The capital Santiago, about 200 miles north of the epicenter, was also badly hit. The international airport was closed for at least 24 hours as the quake destroyed passenger walkways and shook glass out of doors and windows.

“I thought I’d blown a tire … but then I saw the highway moving like it was a piece of paper and I realized it was something much worse,” said one man who was forced to abandon his car on a wrecked highway overpass.

Chile’s Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, suspended operations at its El Teniente and Andina mines, but reported no major damage and said it expected the mines to be up and running in the “coming hours.”

Production was halted at the Los Bronces and El Soldado copper mines, owned by Anglo American Plc, but Chile’s biggest copper mine, Escondida, was operating normally.

Chile produces about 34 percent of world supply of copper, which is used in electronics, cars and refrigerators.

TSUNAMI

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said a huge wave hit the Juan Fernandez islands, and archipelago where Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned in the 18th century inspiring the novel Robinson Crusoe.

“There was a series of waves that got bigger and bigger, which gave people time to save themselves,” pilot Fernando Avaria told TVN television by telephone from the main island. Three people were killed and four missing there, he said.

Bachelet said residents were evacuated from coastal areas of Chile’s remote Easter Island, a popular tourist destination in the Pacific famous for its towering Moai stone statues.

Unusually big waves battered Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, where residents were moved to higher ground as a precaution.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a Pacific-wide tsunami warning for the U.S. state of Hawaii and countries as far away as Japan, Russia, Philippines, Indonesia and the South Pacific. French Polynesia was also put on alert.

“Chile probably got the brunt force of the tsunami already. So probably the worst has already happened in Chile,” said Victor Sardina, geophysicist at the warning center.

“The tsunami was pretty big too. We reported some places around 8 feet. And it’s quite possible it would be higher in other areas,” he added.

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause “tremendous damage,” the USGS says. The January 12 quake that devastated Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince was measured as magnitude 7.0.

In 1960, a massive earthquake in Chile generated waves that reached the Philippines in about 24 hours.

FLAMES, LOOTING

Local television showed a building in flames in Concepcion, one of Chile’s largest cities with around 670,000 inhabitants. Some residents looted pharmacies and a collapsed grains silo, hauling off bags of wheat, television images showed.

Broken glass and chunks of concrete and brick were strewn across roads and several strong aftershocks rattled jittery residents in the hours after the initial quake.

In the moments after the quake, people streamed onto the streets of the Chilean capital hugging each other and crying.

“My house is completely destroyed, everything fell over … it has been totally destroyed. Me and my wife huddled in a corner and after hours they rescued us,” said one elderly man in central Santiago.

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago. Emergency officials said buildings in the historic quarters of two southern cities, mainly made of adobe, had been badly damaged and local radio said three hospitals had partially collapsed.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world’s biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900. The 9.5 magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing 1,655 people and sending a tsunami that battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile’s Pacific coast and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Saturday’s quake shook buildings as far away as Argentina’s Andean provinces of Mendoza and San Juan. A series of strong aftershocks rocked Chile’s coastal region from Valdivia in the south to Valparaiso, about 500 miles to the north.

The United Nations and the White House said they were closely monitoring the situation in Chile and the potential threat of tsunamis in the Pacific.

“We stand ready to help (Chile) in this hour of need,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

A State Department official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was being kept apprised of the situation in Chile, which she is due to visit on Tuesday on a Latin American tour.

(Additional reporting by Helen Popper, Kevin Gray and Guido Nejamkis in Buenos Aires, editing by Anthony Boadle)

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By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: January 31, 2010

DENVER — In the last two weeks, more than 100 mostly tiny earthquakes a day, on average, have rattled a remote area of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, putting scientists who monitor the park’s strange and volatile geology on alert.
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Researchers say that for now, the earthquake cluster, or swarm — the second-largest ever recorded in the park — is more a cause for curiosity than alarm. The quake zone, about 10 miles northwest of the Old Faithful geyser, has shown little indication, they said, of building toward a larger event, like a volcanic eruption of the type that last ravaged the Yellowstone region tens of thousands of years ago.

The area is far from any road or community, and the park is relatively empty in winter. Swarms of small quakes, including a significant swarm last year, are relatively common.

But at a time when the disastrous earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12 has refocused global attention on the earth’s immense store of tectonic energy, scientists say that the Yellowstone swarm, if only because of its volume, bears close observation: as of Sunday, there had been 1,608 quakes since Jan. 17.

“We’re not seeing a pattern that is really discernible yet,” said Henry Heasler, a coordinating scientist for the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, a joint venture of Yellowstone, the United States Geological Survey and the University of Utah. Dr. Heasler said plans were in place to intensify observations in case the swarm continued for a long time or got larger. “We’re ready to ramp up,” he said, including using flights to monitor the area.

Researchers at the University of Utah’s Seismograph Stations who have tracked Yellowstone swarms said they thought it was coincidental that another big swarm of more 1,000 quakes had struck the park just over a year ago. At the time, it was the second-biggest cluster recorded there. The largest swarm was in 1985, when 3,000 earthquakes struck over three months.

Last year’s swarm, beneath northern Yellowstone Lake, had a specific track of alignment, with the earthquakes moving north and growing shallower from the initial quake area, said Robert B. Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and a science coordinator at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

The mostly smaller quakes in the current swarm, he said, are more like a cloud, with no directional pattern, similar to what scientists saw in a big swarm at the park in 1999. “We think the crust beneath Yellowstone is highly fractured already, so we’re getting stress release in these earthquakes — a displacement of millimeters,” Dr. Smith said.

Dr. Heasler said researchers use the park’s geologic wonders, like Old Faithful — which spews steam and water on schedule, plus or minus 10 minutes — as indicators of the effects of quake activity. He and his team look for changes in water temperature, or mud plumes in hot pools that otherwise run clear. This swarm, he said, seems not to have affected any of those natural monitors, though he emphasized that analysis was continuing.

Attention to earthquakes in general has soared since the quake in Haiti. For instance, visits to the United States Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program Web site increased fivefold after the quake, to more than a million a day, compared with the numbers a month earlier, an agency spokeswoman said.

Dr. Heasler said park visitors had been encouraged to help with the research by telling park officials if they felt the ground shake.

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Quake hits off Cayman Islands
January 19, 2010 — Updated 1813 GMT (0213 HKT)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* No immediate reports of injuries after earthquake off Cayman Islands
* “There was quite a bit of shaking,” says shop manager in George Town, Cayman Islands
* U.K. territory in Caribbean about 600 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti

RELATED TOPICS

* Earthquakes
* Cayman Islands
* Caribbean

(CNN) — A 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday off the Cayman Islands, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The 6.2-mile deep quake hit at 9:23 a.m. ET, 40 miles from George Town, Cayman Islands, the USGS reported. George Town, the capital, is on the western shore of Grand Cayman Island.

There were no immediate reports of injuries in the three-island chain in the Caribbean.

The British territory of the Cayman Islands is about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which was devastated last week by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

Tuesday’s quake struck about 32 miles (52 kilometers) east-southeast of Bodden Town in the center of the southern coast of Grand Cayman Island.

Are you in the Cayman Islands? Share photos, video

It caused shaking at the Pedro St. James National Historic Site, about a 10-minute drive from Bodden Town, said Sonya Hydes, the gift shop manager.

“There was quite a bit of shaking,” she said.

Hydes said she called her husband after the shaking stopped to see if their house was affected. He told her that he felt the quake but that it did not damage their house.

There are reports that the quake toppled power lines in Bodden Town, said Kafara Augustine, a news producer for Cayman 27.

Augustine said she felt the shaking from within her office in central George Town. She and her colleagues quickly evacuated the building, seeking safety in the streets, she said. The two-story building did not suffer any damage and from what she could see, everything else seemed unharmed during the quake, she said.

The quake startled Davy Ebanks, general manager of the North Sound Club, a golf course on the Seven Mile Beach strip of western Grand Cayman Island. He said he was reading about the earthquake in Haiti on the Internet when he suddenly felt shaking.

“I just bolted,” he said. “It was rocking and rolling pretty good.”

The trembling knocked some picture frames off balance and sent some mannequins tumbling in the pro shop, but otherwise did little damage at the club, he said.

About 215 miles (346 kilometers) from the temblor in Cienfuegos, Cuba — a city on the southern coast of the communist island — residents said they felt nothing.

The Caymans are about 167 (268 kilometers) miles northwest of Jamaica and about 140 miles (240 kilometers) south of Cuba, according to the CIA World Fact Book.

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Reuters – A major earthquake hit the impoverished country of Haiti on Tuesday, collapsing buildings in the capital …

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A major earthquake hit impoverished Haiti on Tuesday, toppling buildings in the capital Port-au-Prince, burying residents in rubble and causing many deaths and injuries, witnesses in the city said.

The magnitude 7.0 quake, whose epicenter was inland and only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, sent panic-stricken people screaming into the streets of the city, as a cloud of dust and smoke from falling buildings rose into the sky.

As darkness fell amid scenes of chaos and anguished cries from victims, residents desperately tried to dig out survivors or searched for missing relatives in debris-strewn streets.

The presidential palace was among the buildings damaged, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, Raymond Alcide Joseph, told CNN.

“My country is facing a major catastrophe,” he said.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has a history of destructive natural disasters. Some 9,000 U.N. police and troops are stationed there to maintain order.

The major quake, followed by several aftershocks, prompted a tsunami watch for parts the Caribbean but this was later canceled.

“Everything started shaking, people were screaming, houses started collapsing … it’s total chaos,” Reuters reporter Joseph Guyler Delva said in Port-au-Prince.

“I saw people under the rubble, and people killed,” he added, saying he had witnessed dozens of casualties.

U.S. President Barack Obama said his “thoughts and prayers” were with the people of Haiti and pledged to come to their aid. The Obama administration said the State Department, USAID and U.S. military were working to coordinate assistance.

The United States “will be providing both civilian and military disaster relief and humanitarian assistance,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

A local employee for the charity Food for the Poor reported seeing a five-story building collapse in Port-au-Prince, spokeswoman Kathy Skipper told Reuters.

Another Food for the Poor employee said there were more houses destroyed than standing in Delmas Road, a major thoroughfare in the city.

“Within a minute of the quake … soil, dust and smoke rose up over the city, a blanket that completely covered the city and obscured it for about 12 minutes until the atmospheric conditions dissipated the dust,” Mike Godfrey, who works for USAID, told CNN from the city.

Experts said the quake’s epicenter was very shallow at a depth of only 6.2 miles, which was likely to have magnified the destruction.

PEOPLE SCREAMED ‘JESUS, JESUS’

Speaking to CNN from Port-au-Prince, Ian Rogers of the charity Save the Children said he could hear cries of anguish and mourning rising up from around the city in the darkness.

Homes and buildings built on hillsides had come crashing down along with earth and rubble.

“All the roads currently are blocked,” Rogers said.

“People were screaming ‘Jesus, Jesus’ and running in all directions,” Delva said.

The Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, where many foreigners stay, suffered at least some minor damage.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091217-west-mata-submarine-volcano-video.html

Spectacular Sea Eruption Filmed — Deepest Ever The video player is loading. If it does not appear shortly, you may need to enable JavaScript in your Web browser and/or get the latest Flash Player plug-in to view it. Email to a Friend View All News Videos What’s This? SHARE Digg StumbleUpon Reddit RELATED * VIDEO: Deep-Sea Eruption, Odd Animals Seen * Underwater Pictures December 17, 2009—See the recent “underwater Fourth of July” scientists believe is the deepest volcanic eruption ever seen—with three-foot-wide lava bubbles and flows creeping over the seafloor. © 2009 National Geographic; Video courtesy National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Unedited Transcript Researchers witnessed a spectacular, fiery underwater volcano explosion, and captured it on video. Its believed to be the deepest ocean volcano eruption ever recorded. The undersea Pacific Ocean explosions in May of this year were recorded using a remote operating vehicle. Under the tone of the vehicle motors, recorded by a hydrophone, you can hear the muffled sounds of the explosions, still audible under 4,000 feet of ocean water. An expedition team, which included researchers from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was conducting observations in an area of the Pacific bounded by the island nations of Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. The eruption was southeast of Samoa. One of the lead scientists called it, an underwater Fourth of July. Images show large molten lava bubbles about three feet across; glowing red vents ejecting lava into the sea, and lava flows across the seafloor. This West Mata volcano stands more than a mile high off the ocean floor. Its eruptive area is about the length of a football field. It is producing Boninite lavas, believed to be among the hottest erupting on Earth in modern times. Researchers believe they have a unique chance to study magma formation and how the Earth recycles material where tectonic plates slide against each other. A microbiologist on the team found diverse microbes in the extreme conditions, and they observed a small species of shrimp thriving. Its believed to be the same shrimp species found at eruptive sites more than 3,000 miles away. Mission scientists believe 80 percent of eruptive activity on Earth occurs in the ocean, and most volcanoes are in the deep sea. But until this discovery, NOAA and the National Science Foundation had sponsored submarine volcano research for 25 years, without observing a deep-ocean eruption like this one, which is now recorded for all of us to see.

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CURIOUS EVENTS IN NEBRASKA: Earthquakes don’t rock Nebraska very often. In fact, seismically speaking, it is one of the quietest places in North America. Nevertheless, on Dec. 16th at 8:54 pm CST, USGS seismographs detected a magnitude 3.5 temblor centered near Auburn, Nebraska:

Click to view earthquake details and Nebraska seismic probabilities

“It sounded like those loud grain haulers that drive by, but about five times louder,” reports Laurie Riley, who lives near the epicenter. “The whole house shook. My kids came running down stairs – they were scared. It even moved my car, [which was parked outside on icy ground].”

And then the really curious thing happened.

Minutes after the quake, around 9 pm CST, lightning-like flashes lit up the skies around the area of the quake. Telephones in police departments and TV stations rang with reports of bright lights, loud rumbles and shaking ground. Sky watchers, not only in southeastern Nebraska, but also in neighboring Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas, saw a “bright fireball” with “green streamers” moving from northwest to southeast.

Could these events be connected? Nebraska State Trooper Jerry Chab, an experienced amateur astronomer who witnessed the lights and was one of the first to report them, says no. “I think we have the most cosmic of coincidences: A bright [meteoritic] fireball around the same time as an earthquake.” Indeed, eyewitness descriptions of the fireball are consistent with a meteoroid disintegrating in the atmosphere. On the other hand, several readers have pointed out scientific studies that associate lightning-like phenomena (including ball lightning) with earthquakes: #1, #2, #3. The fireball, they suggest, might have been a rare manifestation of “earthquake lightning.”

More reports could help sort out the possibilities. Readers with photos or eyewitness accounts are encouraged to submit their observations.

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Sat Nov 21, 2009 8:39am EST

By Jonathan Lynn

GENEVA (Reuters) – After a year’s delay, scientists at the world’s biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate “Big Bang” conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have established circulating particle beams in both directions in the underground Large Hadron Collider, a step that is already beyond where the experiment stalled during a first attempt in September 2008, CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

The high-profile experiment, through which tiny particles are smashed in a bid to learn more about the birth of the universe, failed just nine days after it was launched due to a technical problem that took longer than expected to fix.

“We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators Steve Myers, saying the extra year had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentations and computer software.

Myers added that researchers had increased the sensitivity of the protections at the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.82 billion) collider under the French-Swiss border.

“If anything happens, we would not have the same amount of damage we had last year,” he said.

CERN, a 55-year-old organization that counts 10,000 scientists and technicians worldwide working on its research projects, has vigorously rebuffed any suggestion the ground-breaking experiment would cause the world to end.

CERN’s Director General Rolf Heuer said getting the experiment re-started had been an “herculean effort.”

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way,” he said.

If things continue to progress at this speed, scientists may be able to accelerate particles at the highest energy level ever tested before Christmas, although high-energy collisions that may shed light on the secrets of the universe would only happen in the new year, Myers said.

The experiment will be fully under way when the particle beams will be smashed at high energy levels. This will most likely happen in January.

The next important step in the experiment will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now, CERN said.

(Writing by Lisa Jucca, Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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Eating Test Tube Burgers
from the August 25, 2009 eNews issue

http://www.khouse.org

Food is always big news. From the dangers of a high-McDonald’s lifestyle to the potential cancer-fighting benefits of chocolate, people are always interested in food. In those parts of the world where people don’t necessarily eat every day, a steady food supply is serious business. At the same time, researchers and scientists have developed some bizarre methods for producing food, and the products may or may not be as great as their advertisers claim.

Test Tube Meat:
CNN reports that research group New Harvest has been working on creating “meat” in a laboratory. In an effort to get away from the hassles of animal production, with the space and grain requirements, New Harvest researchers are growing their protein-rich products in steel vats. New Harvest also claims its lab-made meat comes free of the diseases that can be found on normal animal farms.

The process does not require anything exotic like big computers recombining atoms. Nature is still used, after a fashion. The eggs of cows or pigs are collected from a local slaughterhouse. Those eggs are fertilized and the resulting embryos are put in a nutrient solution where they can grow as big and strong as embryos can without a uterus involved. The in-vitro meat can’t replace a chicken leg or steak, but it can work as ground meat, sausages or chicken nuggets.

“Cultured meat would have a lot of advantages,” said Jason Matheny of New Harvest. “We could precisely control the amount of fat in meat. We could make ground beef with an ideal fatty acid ratio — a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them.”

Environmentalists and animal rights groups are excited about the prospect of moving the world’s meat supplies from the stockyard to the lab. They visualize a world with no more cramped chicken runs packed with birds that are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. They imagine rainforests safe from bulldozers because new fields are not needed to grow crops to feed cattle.

One environmental scientist was less than impressed with the plan, however, commenting on the CNN article:

“Animal cells do not manufacture protein out of wishes and moonbeams. There will be a feedstock, likely based mostly on soy and corn to balance the protein content just like animal feed today. It will be heavily chemically processed to break it down into a form muscle cells can use. There will be waste from this process which will be chemically similar to the waste produced by animal digestion. The metabolic processes of the tank meat will also produce waste which will be essentially identical to the waste produced by metabolism in an intact animal.”

In other words, this isn’t a food-from-nothing effort. There will still be feed and waste issues to deal with. We cannot grow in-vitro burgers “in a cup” in space for 700 years while WALL-E stacks our garbage into skyscrapers, fun as that sounds. At the same time, it would seem that, pound for pound, growing embryos would require less feed and would emit less waste than a steer that eats for half a year before it’s slaughtered.

Either way, there is something perverse about eating animal embryos, even coated with sweet and sour sauce. It might not be Soylent Green, but it will still take a long time to convince consumers that in-vitro is all good to eat.

Organic Continues To Thrive:
Test tube chicken nuggets are not the only option. There are other alternatives to hormone-filled chickens squished in cages. As the economy has slowed down, folks have been returning to their own backyards. People with a few acres are taking advantage of their land to let a bullock or two forage during the summer. Gardens grown with heirloom seeds and old-fashioned manure can be guaranteed free of chemicals and genetically modified vegetables. A few happy chickens wandering around the yard not only eat bugs, and poop out natural fertilizer, but they offer hormone-free eggs and even an occasional healthy supper of chicken and dumplings. Feathers are messy, but we all make trades in life.

Organic farms have flourished in recent decades as people shy away from the hormones and chemicals and genetically modified produce that have overtaken supermarket shelves. Even in the cities, rooftop and vacant lot gardens have cropped up. A good supply of tomatoes or basil can be gathered from potted plants on a balcony, and they taste miles better than the ones from the store.

Future Famine?
In Revelation 6:5-6, the Bible speaks of a time when a simple measure of wheat will cost an entire day’s wages. Famines are not new, and there will be some terrible ones in the future. The problem is not lack of resources or overpopulation, however. The majority of famines on earth are man-made. The horrible economic conditions of the future will be caused by mismanagement and corrupt government rather than a lack of land or water, or even of a shortage of embryonic-beef burgers.

The Christian’s Famine Today:
Too many Christians today suffer from malnourishment; we are living in famine conditions but the famine has nothing to do with food. Our famine is like the one that Amos spoke of:

“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.” – Amos 8:11

Let’s put as much effort into feeding ourselves with the Word of God as we do putting supper (with or without in-vitro burgers) on the table. After all, man does not live by bread alone.

Related Links:
• In-Vitro Meat: Would Lab-Burgers Be Better For Us And The Planet? – CNN
• Opinion: Is In-Vitro Steak The Meat That Can’t Be Beat? – Digital Journal
• Organic Farmers Seek Healthier Future – The Wall Street Journal
• Rooftop Garden a Sweet Success – Telegram and Gazette
• Biotech: The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice – Koinonia House

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Page last updated at 13:18 GMT, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 Earthquake strikes southern Iran An earthquake has struck southern Iran, with hundreds of people suffering injuries, a state news agency says. There are no reported deaths but about 100 people needed hospital treatment, the Irna news agency said. The 4.9-magnitude quake in Bandar Abbas sent people streaming into open spaces and cut power cables in the city. Iran straddles a major geological fault line, making it prone to tremors. In 2008, seven people were killed in an earthquake in the same region. On average one earthquake hits the country each day, although most are minor tremors and are often in sparsely populated regions. The deadliest quake to hit Iran in recent years was in 2003, when 25,000 people died in a 6.7-magnitude quake in Bam. Bandar Abbas is home to a large oil refinery that serves the Iranian domestic market. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8342388.stm

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By FILI SAGAPOLUTELE, For The Associated Press Fili Sagapolutele, For The Associated Press –

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa – Towering tsunami waves spawned by a powerful earthquake swept ashore on Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday, flattening villages, killing at least 34 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 waters as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage.

The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about 20 miles below to ocean floor, 120 miles (190 kilometers) from American Samoa, a U.S. territory that is home to 65,000 people, and 125 miles (200 kilometers) from Samoa.

Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high roared ashore soon afterward, reaching up to a mile inland. Holly Bundock, spokeswoman for the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region in Oakland, Calif., said Reynolds spoke to officials from under a coconut tree uphill from Pago Pago Harbor and reported that the park’s visitor center and offices appeared to have been destroyed.

Bundock said Reynolds and another park service staffer had been able to locate only 20 percent of the park’s 13 to 15 employees and 30 to 50 volunteers. The National Park of American Samoa is the only national park south of the equator, a scenic expanse of reefs, picturesque beaches, tropical forests and wildlife that include sea turtles and flying foxes, a type of fruit bat.

Residents in both Samoa and American Samoa reported being shaken awake by the quake, which lasted two to three minutes. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a general alert from American Samoa to New Zealand; Tonga suffered some coastal damage from 13-foot waves.

Mase Akapo, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in American Samoa, said at least 14 people were killed in four different villages on the main island of Tutuila, while 20 people died neighboring Samoa. The initial quake was followed by at three aftershocks of at least 5.6 magnitude.

An Associated Press reported saw the bodies of about 20 victims in a hospital at Lalomanu town on the south coast of the main island, Upolu, and said the surrounding tourist coast had been flattened, with the dead including those who hesitated to leave right after the quake.

An unspecified number of fatalities and injuries were reported in the Samoan village of Talamoa. New Zealander Graeme Ansell said the beach village of Sau Sau Beach Fale was leveled.

“It was very quick. The whole village has been wiped out,” Ansell told New Zealand’s National Radio from a hill near Samoa’s capital, Apia. “There’s not a building standing. We’ve all clambered up hills, and one of our party has a broken leg. There will be people in a great lot of need ’round here.”

The Samoan capital was virtually deserted with schools and businesses closed.

Local media said they had reports of some landslides in the Solosolo region of the main Samoan island of Upolu and damage to plantations in the countryside outside Apia.

American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono was at his Honolulu office assessing the situation but was having difficulty getting information, said Filipp Ilaoa, deputy director of the office.

Rescue workers found a scene of destruction and debris with cars overturned or stuck in mud, and rockslides hit some roads. Several students were seen ransacking a gas station/convenience store.

Rear Adm. Manson Brown, Coast Guard commander for the Pacific region, said the Coast Guard is in the early stages of assessing what resources to send to American Samoa. Coast Guard spokesman Lt. John Titchen said a C-130 was being dispatched Wednesday to deliver aid, asssess damage and take the governor back home. A New Zealand air force P3 Orion maritime search airplane also was being sent.

One of the runways at Pago Pago (Pan-go, pan-go) International Airport was being cleared of widespread debris for emergency use, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said in Los Angeles.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was deploying teams to American Samoa to provide support and on the ground assessment.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of American Samoa and all those in the region who have been affected by these natural disasters,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

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

The earthquake and tsunami were big, but not on the same large 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 2004 earthquake was at least 10 times stronger than the 8.0 to 8.3 measurements being reported for Tuesday’s quake, Atwater said. It’s also a different style of earthquake than the one that hit in 2004.

The tsunami hit American Samoa about 25 minutes after the quake, which is similar to the travel time in 2004, Atwater said. The big difference is there were more people in Indonesia at risk than in Samoa.

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Associated Press writer Keni Lesa in Apia, Samoa, Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, Jaymes Song in Honolulu and Seth Borenstein and Michele Salcedo in Washington contrinuted to this report.

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