8.1 Quake Strikes Pacific Islands; No One Injured
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — An earthquake recorded at 8.1 on the Richter scale struck a remote Pacific archipelago Monday, but New Zealand scientists on the only inhabited island said no one was hurt.
“They’re all OK. There’s no damage,” Jeremy Lumley, a technical officer at the meteorological observatory in Wellington, said in a telephone interview. “They said a few things tumbled off the shelves. That’s about it.”
The scientists that Lumley contacted were at the weather station on Raoul, also known as Sunday Island, in the Kermadec Islands, about 750 miles northeast of New Zealand’s North Island and south of Tonga. New Zealand administers the Kermadecs.
The U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the temblor measured 8.1 on the Richter scale, which would make it the biggest recorded earthquake since one of the same strength devastated parts of Mexico City on Sept. 19, 1985.
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