A large quake has struck the Central American country of Panama, briefly prompting fears of a Pacific tsunami.<\/p>\n
It hit at 6.56am NZ time in the south of the country, measuring magnitude 7.7 at a depth of 33km. It was initially reported as magnitude 8, downgraded to 7.6 then adjusted to 7.7.<\/p>\n
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and GNS Science initially said it was assessing whether the quake had created a tsunami that could affect New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“Based on current information, the initial assessment is that the earthquake is unlikely to have caused a tsunami that will affect New Zealand,” it said about half an hour later.<\/p>\n
There were no immediate reports of damage in Panama, Reuters reported, with television footage showing people evacuating buildings.<\/p>\n
The US Tsunami Warning Center’s latest issue said based on all available data, there was no tsunami threat to Guam, Rota, Tininan or Saipan, nor American Samoa or Hawai’i.<\/p>\n
There were earlier warnings of potential tsunami across Central America and in Columbia and Ecuador.<\/p>\n
The quake was felt in the capital, Reuters reported, and in Costa Rica.<\/p>\n
Aftershocks measuring up to magnitude 5.8 followed soon after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A large quake has struck the Central American country of Panama, briefly prompting fears of a Pacific tsunami.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-625737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}