Magnitude-5.7 earthquake shakes Big Island of Hawaii

Shaking could be felt in Honolulu following the quake centered south of Naalehu, Hawaii.

A USGS map showing the location of an earthquake on the Big Island of Hawaii Feb. 9, 2024.
USGS

The U.S. Geological Survey said Friday that a magnitude-5.7 earthquake struck the Big Island of Hawaii with some shaking reported about 200 miles away in Honolulu.

The earthquake about 10 a.m. local time was centered 11 miles south of Naalehu, Hawaii, at a depth of 6 miles. No tsunami warning was expected, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

Some shaking could be felt in Honolulu on the island of Oahu, according to the USGS Did You Feel It? page. Several aftershocks followed in the same area.

There were no immediate reports of significant damage.

Big Island Mayor Mitch Roth was in Honolulu at a cardiologist appointment.

“All of a sudden I felt like I was getting dizzy,” he said, thinking at first that it was the procedure and then realizing it was an earthquake. He immediately got on the phone with his emergency management officials.

“We’ll probably start hearing about damage in the next hour to an hour,” Roth said, pointing out that it was "a good sized earthquake” and that from what he's heard, there is no tsunami threat.

Roth said he was headed to the Honolulu airport to try to get an earlier flight back to the Big Island.

Julia Neal, the owner of Pahala Plantation Cottages, said a mirror and brass lamp fell down during some forceful shaking. “We have a lot of the old wooden plantations homes and so they were rattling pretty loudly.”

Derek Nelson, the manager of the Kona Canoe Club restaurant in the Kona Inn Shopping Village in the oceanside community of Kona, on the island’s western side, said everyone felt it “big time,” but that there was no damage.

“I mean, it shook us bad to where it wobbled some knees a little bit. It shook all the windows in the village,” he said.

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