Whale-watching, kayak tours and other water activities went on as usual on the Island on Wednesday, after a tsunami advisory issued in the wake of a massive underwater earthquake off Russia was cancelled.
The largest waves on Vancouver Island were seen in Port Alberni, where initial waves measured 50 centimetres around 1 a.m., said Collin Paul, a seismic analyst with Natural Resources Canada.
Port Alberni continued to see waves up to 30 centimetres late Wednesday morning, he said.
In Tofino, the largest waves were 15 centimetres, while Victoria saw 12 centimetres.
Paul said it’s possible later waves could be larger, but modelling shows the effects will not be enough to cause concern.
He said standing on the beach was safe on Wednesday, but he cautioned against swimming.
“Unlike wind waves, tsunamis are actually the entire column of water moving. So it’s a significant amount of water that’s moving,” Paul said.
The tsunami was largely focused in a southwest direction toward Hawaii, where “run-ups” of over a metre were observed, he said.
After the advisory was issued on Tuesday evening, Paula Olsen and other members of the Port Alice volunteer fire department gathered to discuss how to get people out of Marine Drive, the village’s waterfront street, if an evacuation order was issued.
Several people, including Olsen, also took their boats out of their moorage slips and into the inlet to prevent any possible damage from vessels smashing against the docks.
But in the end, none of that was needed, as Port Alice saw “nothing” from the earthquake across the Pacific, she said.
The quake struck just before 4:25 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, about 119 kilometres east-southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city of about 180,000 residents in Russia’s Kamchatka region.
The preliminary magnitude reading of 8.8 means it would be the world’s strongest quake since 2011.
The District of Tofino said on Wednesday morning that it was safe to return to beaches, harbours and shoreline areas, after earlier urging people to stay clear of the coast until the tsunami advisory was lifted.
Ahous Adventures, an ecotourism company in Tofino, went ahead Wednesday with its 8 a.m. sea tour, which began in slightly foggy conditions, without incident, it said.
Claudia Milia, marketing and communications lead for Prince of Whales and North Island Kayak, said the company had received only two calls from concerned customers, and its tours running out of Telegraph Cove were full on Wednesday morning. Prince of Whales also operates in Victoria and Vancouver.
“Fortunately, our Island was very safe and we’ve had absolutely zero concern,” she said.
Tofino Sea Kayaking kayak supervisor John Hockin, however, said he was prepared to spend much of the day dealing with freaked-out guests and clients.
“I’m actually in the middle of quite a long list of phone calls,” he said when reached by phone on Wednesday morning.
Hockin said “not a whisper” of a tsunami showed up Tuesday night in Tofino.
It was the same in Sooke, said Antonio Bortolotti at West Coast Outdoor Adventure, the water sports equipment rental outlet where he was working on Wednesday.
Bortolotti, who has taught scuba diving in the tropics and in Southeast Asia around the Ring of Fire — the most seismically and volcanically active zone in the world — said it was “business as usual” at the store Wednesday, although he cautioned there may be aftershocks in coming days.
“We’re not completely out. There could be a sequence of earthquakes in a week — you never know with these things.”
Katsu Goda, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario, said the event is a reminder of the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis in coastal B.C., which is on the Ring of Fire.
If an earthquake happened off the west coast, residents wouldn’t have the hours of warning that people had on Tuesday, he said.
“It will be maybe 10 minutes, 20 minutes. So then people really have to react quickly,” Goda.
