Families left without homes collect blankets for the night at a shelter
A strong earthquake near Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East on Thursday killed two people and injured up to 10 others, generating small tsunami waves (1 to 3 feet) which struck northern Japan. The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, struck at 11:38 a.m. on the southern tip of Sakhalin, just north of Japan, according to Japan's Meteorological Agency. It was followed by a second quake of magnitude 5.9 at 2:22 p.m. One woman died when a building roof collapsed in the small port town of Nevelsk. Another man there died of a heart attack. Six hundred families lost their private homes, while the bigger condominium buildings survived the quakes.
A Reuters reporter on Sakhalin said he felt three tremors over a two-hour period. The third, at about 4:00 p.m., was the most intense. Local office workers ran on to the street fearing the third tremor was a major quake they had been anticipating. "Just about everybody in the building dashed to the street," said Anastasia Lekhnova, an employee of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk security firm Troop Service. "We've been hearing so much about earthquakes in the news recently, and after knowing about the two quakes today, we thought that this was 'the one.'"
Sakhalin Island is part of the Kurils, a chain of volcanic islands. The island has a sister city relationship with the town of Gig Harbor in Washington State
Local Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Sergei Viktorov said cracks appeared in buildings and that furniture fell over inside apartments. "But there is no damage to other towns, only to Nevelsk," Viktorov said, adding that energy supplies had been disrupted.
The epicenter, 47.2 degrees north latitude and 141.8 degrees east longitude, was about 50 miles west of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk City, with a population of 180,000, and 125 miles away from Hokkaido of Japan and 310 miles away from Chinese border. There have been 11 aftershocks following the quake.
