Magnitude-8.7 tremor prompts Hawaii to order evacuations from some coastal areas
(Reuters) -- A magnitude-8.7 earthquake struck off Russia's Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula on Wednesday, generating a tsunami of up to 4 meters, damaging buildings and prompting evacuation warnings in the area and across most of Japan's east coast, officials said.
"Today's earthquake was serious and the strongest in decades of tremors," Kamchatka Gov. Vladimir Solodov said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app, adding that a kindergarten was damaged.
A tsunami with a height of 3 meters to 4 meters was recorded in parts of Kamchatka, Sergei Lebedev, regional minister for emergency situations said, urging people to move away from shorelines.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was shallow at a depth of 19.3 kilometers, and was centered 126 km east-southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city of 165,000 along the coast of Avacha Bay. It revised the magnitude up from 8.0 earlier.
