ENVIRONMENT – Collapsed buildings and streets littered with debris. A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Vanuatu on Tuesday, December 17, causing significant damage, casualties and a brief tsunami alert. A witness told AFP he saw dead bodies in the streets of the capital Port Vila.
Videos on social networks showed significant damage to a building housing several diplomatic representations including the French and American embassies, as you can see in the posts below. The earthquake toppled a concrete pillar, cracked a wall and distorted windows in the building.
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The epicenter of this earthquake detected at 12:47 p.m. local time (01:47 GMT) was recorded at a depth of 43 kilometers in the sea, just 30 kilometers west of the capital. The Pacific archipelago is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters.
“Tsunami waves were observed”the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) said in a bulletin. The latter initially said he feared the arrival of waves up to a meter high along certain coasts of Vanuatu, before raising his alert.
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Michael Thompson, who lives in the area, told AFP he had seen dead bodies in the streets of the capital Port Vila. He reported collapsed bridges and landslides caused by the earthquake.
Earthquakes are common in Vanuatu, a low-lying archipelago of 320,000 people that straddles the Pacific seismic Ring of Fire, an arc of intense tectonic activity that stretches from Southeast Asia to the Pacific Basin.
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Vanuatu is ranked among the countries most vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, storm damage, floods and tsunamis, according to the annual Global Risks Report.
Much smaller waves (around 30 centimeters according to the PTWC) were also feared in Fiji, Kiribati, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.
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