Tsunami Samoa 2009

(CNN) -- A tsunami warning for the South Pacific was called off hours after a magnitude 8.0 earthquake was recorded near American Samoa, but the extent of the damage of earlier tsunami waves was still unfolding.
There were conflicting reports on the number of dead. American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono, speaking from Hawaii, said 14 people were dead and noted that those missing had been accounted for. Dr. Salamo Laumoli, director of healthservices of American Samoa, said at least 17 deaths were confirmed.
"Two or three villages have been badly damaged," he told CNN International.

An American Samoa homeland security official working at the island's emergency operations center, Cinta Brown, told CNN that the death toll was expected to rise to at least 20.
The White House late Tuesday "declared a major disaster exists in the Territory of American Samoa" and ordered federal aid to supplement local efforts.
The declaration by President Barack Obama makes federal funding available to affected individuals.
The tsunami wave hit right in the middle of the harbor of Pogo Pogo, the capital, Brown said.
Water damage and infrastructure damage was reported throughout the island, she said.
The village of Leone was "sadly devastated," Brown said. "The wave came onshore and washed out people's homes."
The same happened on the hard-hit east and west sides of American Samoa, she said.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, canceled tsunami watches and warnings about four hours after the earthquake hit.
Officials in American Samoa -- a U.S. territory consisting of a small cluster of South Pacific islands -- issued a clear call and were focusing on assessing the damage, Brown said.

The temblor, with a magnitude of 8.0, generated three separate tsunami waves, the largest which measured 5.1 feet from sea level height, Vindell Hsu, a geophysicist with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, told CNN. Preliminary data had originally reported a larger tsunami.

The quake was not expected to generate a tsunami along the west coast of the United States or Canada, according to the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, though a tsunami advisory was put in place.

The Japan Meteorological Agency activated a tsunami advisory along its eastern coast. The precautionary alert means that the height of a possible tsunami wave would be less than a foot and a half.

Reports of damage were still emerging, but a bulletin from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the waves "may have been destructive along coasts near the earthquake epicenter and could also be a threat to more distant coasts. Authorities should take appropriate action in response to this possibility."

The quake was recorded at about 6:48 a.m. (1:28 p.m. ET) at a depth of about 7.4 miles (11.9 km), the USGS reported. Early reports had the magnitude at 7.9, but the USGS upgraded that to 8.0 about two hours after the initial report.

Laumoli, the health services director for American Samoa, said the earthquake was so powerful he felt as though the earth might split.

"It was the largest earthquake I have ever felt," he said.
Brown agreed.

She was standing in a parking lot when the earthquake hit, shaking her sports utility vehicle left and right.

"You could hear the rattling of the metal" of a large chain link fence around the lot, Brown said.

"It shakes you because you know something else is coming," she said.

American Samoa Governor Togiola Tulafono was in Hawaii during the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

The U.S. Coast Guard was sending a C-130 plane to American Samoa to deliver aid and transport Tulafono back, Lt. John Titchen, spokesman for the 14th Coast Guard District, told CNN.
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The Coast Guard also will transport more than 20 officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to American Samoa, said John Hamill, external affairs officer for FEMA in Oakland, California.

The FEMA team will include a variety of debris experts, housing experts, members of the Corps of Engineers, and other disaster relief specialists, Hamill said.

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