HONOLULU – Officials began inspecting bridges and roads across Hawaii on Monday following the strongest earthquake to rattle the islands in more than two decades, a 6.7-magnitude quake that caused blackouts and landslides but no reported fatalities.
At least one stretch of road leading to a bridge near the earthquake’s epicenter on the Big Island collapsed, Civil Defense Agency spokesman Dave Curtis said.
Several other roads on the Big Island were closed by mudslides, debris and boulders, but most were still passable, he said. The power was back on across most of the islands Monday morning. About a dozen schools were closed for inspection, but no major injuries or deaths had been reported.
“If you’re going to have an earthquake, you couldn’t have had it at a better time – early in the morning when people aren’t even out of their homes yet,” Curtis said.
“I think people, under the circumstances, have remained very calm,” he said.
The quake hit at 7:07 a.m. Sunday, 10 miles north-northwest of Kailua-Kona on the west coast of Hawaii Island, known as the Big Island, said Don Blakeman of the National Earthquake Information Center, part of the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS on Monday raised the magnitude for the quake from a preliminary 6.6 to 6.7.
A government computer simulation estimated as many as 170 bridges could have been damaged by the quake, said Bob Fenton, Federal Emergency Management Agency director of response for the region.
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