With cheers and honking horns, people in communities along Vancouver Island’s west coast celebrated the lifting of this morning’s tsunami warning.
The warning was sounded for much of the northwest Pacific coast at about 1:45 a.m. after a magnitude 7.9 earthquake was detected 300 kilometres off the coast of Alaska. It occurred at a depth of 25 km.
Vancouver was not included in the alert.
However, when only a small seismic wave was detected, the alert was lifted around 4:30 a.m.
Emergency Info B.C. says the highest wave detected was 0.7 feet in Old Harbor, Alaska at 3:38 a.m.
John Cassidy, a research scientist for Natural Resources Canada in Sidney, told CBC Radio that the earthquake was a horizontal slipping between the Pacific and North American plates. This type of earthquake, compared to a subduction earthquake, is less effective at generating a tsunami.
