Quake Sparks Brief Tsunami Scare

(CBS/AP)  Fleeing a possible tsunami, people in Cannon Beach, Oregon, raced for higher ground, as a major earthquake struck about 80 miles off the coast of Northern California on Tuesday night.

The 7.0-magnitude quake was recorded at about 7:50 p.m. about 90 miles west southwest of the coastal community of Crescent City and 300 miles northwest of San Francisco, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A tsunami warning was briefly in effect from the California-Mexico border all the way north to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, but was called off about an hour after the quake hit. Evacuations along the coast have also been called off and there were no immediate reports of damages or injuries.

"It appears from the mechanism of the earthquake that this was a strike-slip event so the motion was horizontal not the vertical displacement that typically leads to a tsunami," said Ved Lekic, a seismologist at the University of California Seismographic Station in Berkeley.

Traffic crowded on roads away from the Pacific Ocean when the Cannon Beach was ordered evacuated.

"People didn't panic," reports Ken Boddie of CBS affiliate KOIN-TV. "Many of the folks who come to these coastal areas know that a tsunami or an earthquake or both could occur here."

"About 85 percent of the tsunami-generated in the world take place in the Pacific," geologist David Applegate, senior science adviser for the United States Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program, told CBS News The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen. "So this specific event was just a reminder that this is a very active part of the planet and that there is certainly a risk for coastal communities.

In San Francisco, authorities used the tsunami warning as a drill for emergency services, reports KCBS-AM's Mark Seelig, hoping to gather information on how well the city responded and to improve training for first-responders in the event a real disaster strikes the area in the future.

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