The post 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Australia today earthquake first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The earthquake was at a depth of 14.5 km, the USGS said.

Source: https://thehimalayantimes.com/world/magnitude-62-earthquake-strikes-pangai-tonga-usgs

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Officials and witnesses reported heavy damage and fatalities dozens of miles from the epicenter, 7.4 miles northeast of Saint-Louis du Sud, where the temblor struck at 8:29 a.m. At least 29 have been reported killed, with number of fatalities expected to rise.

Government officials, relief agencies and representatives from the United Nations were still assessing the damage, including via reconnaissance flights over southern and western parts of the country, as a wave of aftershocks continued to hit the island nation. But the sheer force of the temblor and a climbing death toll suggested a devastating new tragedy in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, which has lurched from crisis to crisis for years.

The disaster struck a month of the assassination of the president, leaving a hobbled, interim government in charge of a country so wracked by gang violence and a collapsing rule of law that observers have dubbed it Somalia in the Caribbean.

Now, 11 years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that claimed more than 220,000 lives, Haitians were again dealing with crushed bodies, collapsed buildings and overwhelmed local hospitals.

Ralph Simon, a radio station owner in Jeremie, a city of 30,000 in the Haitian southwest, said many homes and buildings had been leveled or damaged, including a local church. He said he saw two corpses in the rubble. “The impact of this is huge,” he said. “I was still in bed with my children and my wife. My wife had a heart attack, and I had to save her life. . . . There’s damage to houses. People are crying.”

Images on social media and witnesses portrayed scenes of devastation from collapsed structures, with officials saying residents were pouring into ill-equipped local hospitals, toting the injured in cars and the beds of pickup trucks. Neighbors aided rescue workers, trying to lift rubble and knock down walls to reach the stranded.

Haiti’s civil protection agency says at least 29 people killed in earthquake, according to the Associated Press. Preliminary disaster modeling from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and thousands of fatalities.

Silvera Guillaume, civil protection coordinator in the coastal city of Les Cayes, said the community’s resources were being overwhelmed.

“It’s a dire situation, people died. There are people right now under the rubble,” Guillaume said. “We deployed first responders to go and remove rubble, but we do not have enough first responders.”

Améthyste Arcélius, administrator of Immaculate Conception Hospital — the largest in Les Cayes — said that its facilities could not cope with the wounded and that it was in “desperate” need of personnel and medicines.

“There are lots of victims,” Arcélius said. “The hospital needs emergency drugs, health professionals of all categories. Lots of people are coming. The hospital is flooded with victims. We are issuing a call for help.”

At 8:29 a.m., Jabin Phontus, a 23-year-old agronomy student, said he felt his family home in Les Cayes begin to quake.

“I could see the walls breaking, it was scary,” he said by phone. “I took my sister and ran.”

His mother and brother also escaped their five-room home as it crumbled, leaving them scraped by falling debris.

“The house is partially destroyed, some walls are still up, but we can’t sleep inside,” he said. “We don’t know where to go now. We are seeking shelter. A lot of houses in the neighborhood are destroyed.”

As he spoke, he said a group of people near him were “trying to break down a wall to get to someone inside” a house.

Christy Delafield, spokesperson for the charity Mercy Corps, said the group was moving to mobilize a team to the area, but relief workers face logistical challenges. The main road to the area runs through gang infested territories just south of Port-au-Prince, leaving aid groups to focus on access by air. But the regional airport in Les Cayes is a rural airstrip with limited capacity, and was already being overwhelmed.

“We saw a similar situation with Hurricane Dorian” that struck the Bahamas in 2019, Delafield said. “There isn’t a lot of capacity in that area to handle assistance.”

Muhammad Bizimana, assistant country director for Care Haiti, said his organization was also facing logistical challenges, and was having to rely on “local staff” for assessments in the hardest hit areas, given the risks of traveling over land through gang-controlled regions south of Port-au-Prince.

“We’re exploring maritime transport,” he said.

Shelters for untold numbers homeless — especially in denser urban areas in the south and west — remained an immediate priority, he said.

But longer term, the quake had the potential to worsen a hunger crisis in the country. He said he had received reports of crops in the south destroyed by landslides in the aftermath of the earthquake.

“This has not been a good year for Haiti,” Bizimana said. “It’s one crisis after another.”

The reported magnitude from the USGS was greater than the catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit seven miles west of Port-au-Prince in 2010, which resulted in more than 220,000 casualties. The quake on Saturday struck farther away from the densely populated capital than the one in 2010, but the USGS noted that people in the most heavily hit areas largely reside in poorly constructed dwellings that are vulnerable to earthquake shaking.

The earthquake is set to deepen a humanitarian crisis in a country torn apart by hunger, poverty and violence that has never fully recovered from the 2010 quake. After the devastation of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 1.4 million Haitians required humanitarian assistance.

U.N. agencies say 46 percent of the population is already experiencing acute or severe food insecurity — among the highest in the world. In the past, aid agencies have faced massive hurdles to transport aid south of the capital, given the open gang warfare on National Road 2 — the nation’s major western and southern artery.

Haiti also entered a new period of political instability in the aftermath of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July.

Jose Luis Fernandez, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Haiti, said portions of southern Haiti were already facing “severe and acute” food shortages.

The earthquake “will worsen the food insecurity situation in the country, especially in areas of the south. There are pictures of many roads and bridges that have been destroyed. This is going to disrupt the flow of food.”

Haiti reeled from the quake even as the nation looked to the east with trepidation, with Tropical Storm Grace bearing down on the island nation. The storm, with maximum sustained winds of 45 miles per hour, was poised to arrive sometime on Monday, running a risk of heavy rainfall.

Faiola reported from Miami.

Haiti buries a president, but its long-term crisis lives on Haiti has a tragic history of disasters The long legacy of the U.S. occupation of Haiti

© Provided by The Washington Post

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/at-least-29-dead-in-haiti-in-wake-of-7-2-magnitude-earthquake/ar-AANjOtE?ocid=msedgntp

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Russia’s easternmost peninsula is notorious for its seismic activity and is prone to earthquakes and volcano eruptions.

The post 6.9-Magnitude Quake Hits Off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, USGS Reports first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The quake measured magnitude 7.0 and was located 95.8 kilometers (60 miles) below the sea and about 210 kilometers (130 miles) southeast of Pondaguitan in Davao Occidental province, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Source:  click here

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The post Kilauea Volcano Eruption Update: New Lava Lake Grows (Dec. 22, 2020) first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Mount Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island erupted Sunday for the first time since 2018. A 4.4 magnitude earthquake on the volcano’s south flank followed the blast, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS first reported the 9:36 pm, Hawaii Standard Time, eruption in a tweet.

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(CNN)An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 struck off southern Alaska’s coast late Tuesday, shaking the Alaska Peninsula and briefly sparking tsunami concerns before officials said no destructive waves were coming.

People in Sand Point gathered at a high school until shortly after midnight, when officials gave an all-clear, Jordan Keeler, an Anchorage-based city administrator, told the newspaper.

“The first wave didn’t materialize, which is a great thing,” Keeler, who was in contact with staff in Sand Point, told the Anchorage Daily News. No reports of major structural damage were made on the island, Keeler told the newspaper.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Alaska late Tuesday.

“We’ve canceled the (tsunami) advisories because it doesn’t look like it’s becoming a large wave or any larger,” National Tsunami Warning Center Director James Gridley said, according to CNN affiliate KTUU.

Strong shaking was reported on the peninsula, the USGS said. Light to weak shaking was reported around Kodiak, about 300 miles northeast of the quake’s center, and in Anchorage, some 530 miles from the center, according to the USGS.

In Kodiak, a city of about 6,000 people, a long line of cars headed up a mountain after residents learned of the tsunami warning late Tuesday, John Cannon told KTUU.

Police were “trying to clear the lower areas down by the harbor,” he said.

“You (could) hear the tsunami alarms. It’s rather eerie,” he told KTUU.

This quake’s depth was 28 kilometers, or 17 miles, the USGS said — relatively shallow.

“Anything below 70 kilometers is considered a shallow quake,” CNN meteorologist Allison Chinchar said. “That’s important, because shallow earthquakes often cause the most damage, compared to the ones that are deeper, regardless of the strength.”

More than 20 aftershocks followed the quake late Tuesday to early Wednesday, ranging from magnitudes of 2.8 to 6.1.

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CNN’s Joe Sutton contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/22/us/alaska-7-8-magnitude-earthquake/index.html

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The United States Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 and struck at 11:29 a.m. ET, 7 miles west of Santa María Zapotitlán, Mexico.

The temblor had a depth of about 20 miles and was centered along the Pacific coast of Oaxaca state near the resort of Huatulco.

THE “RING OF FIRE’ EXPLAINED

The quake was felt in Guatemala and throughout south and central Mexico.

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake in southern Mexico triggered a tsunami warning for the Pacific Coasts of countries in Central America. (Fox News)

The National Weather Service’s (NWS) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) initially said that “hazardous” tsunami waves from the quake were possible within 620 miles of the epicenter, along the Pacific coasts of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 and struck southern Mexico resort of Huatulco at 11:29 a.m. ET. (Fox News)

That threat passed about two hours after the initial quake, with the PTWC saying that waves of up to 2.2 feet were recorded in Acapulco and Salina Cruz.

“Minor sea-level fluctuations of up to 0.3 meters above and below the normal tide may continue over the next few hours,” the agency said.

Guatemala’s national disaster agency issued a tsunami alert for its southern Pacific coast forecasting the arrival of waves up to a meter high. It advised people to move away from the sea.

A policeman removes rubble from a building damaged by an earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Luis Alberto Cruz Hernandez)

Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said one person was killed and another injured in a building collapse in Huatulco, Oaxaca. Otherwise, he said reports were of minor damage such as broken windows and collapsed walls.

Oaxaca Gov. Alejandro Murat later said a second person was killed in an apparent house collapse in the tiny mountain village of San Juan Ozolotepec.

Security tape alert people of a building damaged by an earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Luis Alberto Cruz Hernandez)

Ports, airports, and refineries were not damaged, he said in a video-recorded phone conversation with his civil defense chief. There had been more than 140 aftershocks, most of them small.

The Mexican Red Cross told Fox News in a statement that volunteers from the organization are continuing to make tours in ambulances to identify possible victims.

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