American Samoa tsunami video
Tsunami Damage in American Samoa Following Pacific Earthquake on Video This video, posted earlier today on YouTube, shows the incredible damage in Leone, American Samoa. Houses were washed away. Cars were left stranded in trees. Bloomberg is now reporting that at least 141 were killed. “You can imagine the sheer force,” the narrator says. In this second video from the Wall Street Journal, Simon Louisson from Dow Jones Newswires in New Zealand, describes the damage and reports that New Zealanders prepared for the possibility of a tsunami strike.
Deep under the ocean, somewhere midway between the two island groups, a shift in the restless Pacific plates had triggered a major earthquake - magnitude measuring 8.0 to 8.3 on the Richter scale. Sleepers were shaken awake. Early risers watched as the sea suddenly retreated, the tide sucking the water way down the beach, the inhale before the exhale. There was little time to run. In some places alarms sounded. In others, local men began shouting and banging on gas cylinders - sounding them like church bells - in an urgent, improvised alert. Some locals dragged their heels, thinking it was just another tsunami trial alarm. When realisation dawned, the panic came.
Most Samoans live by the water, which provides their livelihoods, and where tourists are drawn to a string of exotic resorts capitalising on Samoa's appeal as a remote Polynesian paradise, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. Melbourne school teachers John and Robyn Jaffe, making the most of their South Pacific escape, had already long since left their luxury hotel room at the Virgin Cove Resort. Robyn Jaffe had just finished a shower in the rainforest fringing the beach when she felt the rumble under her feet. But it wasn't until locals began running past her that she grew alarmed and scrambled up on to a water tank for safety. From her perch she saw her husband picked up by the wave as it pushed into the jungle and dragged him through the rocks and undergrowth.
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