Tsunami sirens wailed in Homer and Kodiak while emergency notifications woke up Alaskans for hundreds of miles, including the central Kenai Peninsula, following an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.8 late Tuesday night. It was centered 65 miles south-southeast of Perryville. Tsunami warnings and advisories followed, encompassing the Alaska Peninsula through Kachemak Bay, including Kodiak Island.
Posts on social media detailed lines of folks attempting to leave Homer for higher ground soon after 10:00 p.m. Homer High School is the designated evacuation location for those without higher ground to head towards.
The evacuations did not last long, as the tsunami threat was officially called off by the National Tsunami Warning Center at around 12:30 a.m after a wave of less than ten inches was measured in Sand Point.
Dan Nelson of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management explains why emergency notifications woke many folks who live far from the actual tsunami threat: “Most everybody on the Kenai Peninsula should have gotten a notification on their phone as soon as the Tsunami Warning was issued. That does include people in the central Kenai Peninsula area: Soldotna, Kenai, Cooper Landing, and those communities. They do not have a tsunami danger. Based on how the Cook Inlet is and how that works, there’s not generally a tsunami danger as you come up this far up Cook Inlet. It does just stay around that Kachemak Bay area. So, that’s why there was information going out – it’s an automated message. That happens due to the limitations of the technology that’s used by the federal government to do their warnings, and you may have received a KPB Alert later that said that this area is not in the warning. That’s why there was a bit of a conflict.”
More than a dozen aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or higher were reported immediately after the earthquake.