attention to this, take this seriously, take the precautions, move to higher ground if you need to and get ready for it. all right. well, it sounds like you know the preparations are in place. now it s a waiting game for all of you certainly as you try to figure out just how intense this may be heeding the warnings just to be safe. thanks so much, we appreciate it. getting close to the top of the hour here. we have been telling you about this earthquake. you hear 8.9. but to put that in perspective, this is the fifth largest earthquake the world has seen since 1900. in chile, the largest recorded since 1900, a 9.5 magnitude quake, the second strongest with us 9.2 in alaska. after that in sumatra in 2004, that triggered that massive tsunami that killed so many people in indonesia. the 9.1, that one was. the fourth was in russia, 9.0 quake, and this one registers at 8.9. we are looking at a historic
hawaii, goes there for the holidays. he has instructed fema, the federal emergency management agency to in his words be ready to assist hawaii and the rest of the u.s. states and territories that could be affected. the president had already scheduled a news conference for 11:50 a.m. eastern time here at the white house. aides informed us of that last night saying the president wanted to talk about surging gas prices here in the united states as you can imagine. libya and other international crises were set to come up at the event. all right. ed henry from the white house. i know you re keeping an eye on things. getting statements in. we appreciate you checking in. thank you. joining us now on the phone right now is the news director of hawaiian public radio. and bill, as i understand it, you lived and worked in tokyo for the last couple of years and tracked the earthquake in 1995. thank you for being with us this
disaster. also warnings in effect for the coastal areas of california, coastal areas of oregon right now. and they re looking at the oregon/washington border according to pacific tsunami warning center. and you mentioned the earthquake and the tsunami that hit back in 2004. since then, they ve made a lot of upgrades to get information out to people sooner. they re saying right now, at least according to the hawaii state civil defense that the first impact of these waves emanating from the tsunami could be felt at about 8:07 eastern time. so about an hour from now, it would be about 3:00 in the morning local time. and as we heard, the sirens are going off, letting people know for sure. we ll continue to update that. in the meantime, we want to give you background on what happened. this 8.9 magnitude quake hit a little before 3:00 p.m. in tokyo. a little bit before 1:00 in the morning here on the east coast. the epicenter was in the sea. it was about 230 miles from tokyo. and this quak
for all accounts. it s interesting as she describes, you know, people have nowhere to go because they can t get there because the transportation s obviously been disrupted. very difficult to get in touch with people, as well because so many people are trying to make mobile calls. but relatively speaking when you look at what s happening northeast she was there when the earthquake struck. what s the latest right now? reporter: what i want to briefly update some of our viewers. one of the big concerns here in japan is what s going to happen with the nuclear power plants. we just heard from the government and they ve issued an emergency declaration around one of the nuclear power plants near that devastated area, where we ve seen that tsunami come across. the concern there is that the electrical power isn t quite as strong as they d like. and so they ve told people to stay in their homes until they can figure out exactly what they have here. they do want to make sure that
going to be monitoring as we see this? our job at the usgs is to report on the earthquakes. and of course, that s one part of this disaster is not just the first big disaster, but also the constant aftershocks. i mean we ve already had one over magnitude 7. that would be a large earthquake in its own right. we ve had a dozen over magnitude 6. at the same time the tsunami centers are tracking the progress of these waves across the pacific. this is a system that s been largely built out since that sumatra event, recognition of the challenges associated with it. the warnings that have been issued for the u.s. coast for so many of the islands in the western pacific. some of them the waves have already reached there. the big challenge is that while we can track the wave across the