Tsunami hits Solomons, reports of 8 dead
A powerful undersea earthquake Monday in the South Pacific sent a tsunami several yards high crashing into the Solomon Islands, devastating at least one village, officials and residents said. A man who answered the telephone at the police station said there were initial reports that eight people, six of them children, had been killed by the tsunami but they were still unconfirmed. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake measured magnitude-8.0 and struck at 7:39 a.m. about 6 miles beneath the sea floor, 217 miles northwest of the capital, Honiara. The articles were pretty vague. Everything was unconfirmed, and nothing was really know about the current situation.