Areas ranging from Sydney, Australia, to the Russian Far East to the Hawaiian islands conducted evacuations and warned residents to be on the lookout for large waves following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated parts of Chile on Saturday. The Asia-Pacific region waited in suspense for almost 24 hours, the time that scientists predicted it would take shock waves from the powerful earthquake to race across the ocean in the form of massive waves.

But the predicted time of impact came and went, with only waves of up to 10 centimeters reported near Tokyo and of up to 90 centimeters further north along the Japanese coast. The same was true across the region, where officials breathed an almost audible sigh of relief.

“Luckily, these waves are far smaller than the agency’s forecast,” said Kazuaki Ito, director of the Information Institute of Disaster Prevention, a Tokyo-based non-profit group that advises on natural disasters.

The tsunami warning was lifted in Hawaii on late Saturday after waves of about 1.5 meters were sighted, without any apparent damage. Beaches were briefly cleared of swimmers, and tourists were sent to upper floors of hotels. But nations further west left their alerts in place for much of Sunday, even after waves proved small, in case of additional tsunamis triggered by the huge Chilean temblor.

Nations took the warning seriously in a region where raw memories remain of the deadly December 2004 tsunami in the neighboring Indian Ocean that killed nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries.

Some of the biggest preparations were taken by Japan, where meteorological agency officials issued the nation’s first major tsunami warning in 17 years. They initially said they expected walls of water up to 3 meters, or 9 feet, high.

In Tokyo, train lines and highways in densely populated areas along the edge of Tokyo Bay were stopped for hours. Further north, officials said they ordered the evacuation of some 570,000 households from coastal areas mostly on the main Japanese island of Honshu, a areas that has seen killer tsunamis in the past.

Television news programs showed elderly residents in Iwate prefecture sitting on blankets in school gyms that had been turned into makeshift shelters. In the hilly port city of Hakodate, on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, residents sat on hilltops for hours on Sunday watching the sea.

I was watching on & off the MSNBC coverage and frankly not impressed with their ‘scare’ tactic coverage – based on scientific fact and investigation the after-effects would be obvious but hey what’s with checking things first these days…. granted the potential for loss of life was there but could news channels act again like news channels – reporting the facts not paranoia & spreading fear…..plus I don’t want to hear at the end of it all “Thank God he saved us”….if you believe that surely God caused it in the first place too…

What do you think about all these tsunamis thing?