Tsunami waves up to two metres high struck parts of French Polynesia early today. Other Pacific nations were evacuating coastlines ahead of a tsunami generated by a devastating earthquake in Chile, the New Zealand Herald reported. Authorities in Hawaii were rushing to evacuate up to 100,000 residents and tourists from coastal areas.


ALERTS were being issued in countries bordering the Pacific today after an 8.8-magnitude undersea quake rocked the coast of Chile in South America.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre advised: SEA LEVEL READINGS CONFIRM THAT A TSUNAMI HAS BEEN GENERATED
WHICH COULD CAUSE WIDESPREAD DAMAGE. AUTHORITIES SHOULD TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION IN RESPONSE TO THIS THREAT. THIS CENTER WILL CONTINUE TO MONITOR SEA LEVEL DATA TO DETERMINE THE EXTENT AND
SEVERITY OF THE THREAT.

The warnings included Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand, China and Japan as well as Hawaii and California and extended as far west as Indonesia but did not list Thailand by name.

The center called for ''urgent action to protect lives and property'' in Hawaii, which is among 53 nations and territories subject to tsunami warnings.

One online source reported that a three-meter tsunami wave hit the Robinson Crusoe island, the largest in the Chilean Juan Fernandez archipelago.

Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, said: ''A village on the island is half-flooded, people have been evacuated to higher elevations.''

The quake's toll in Chile has risen to 147, officials said.

The largest quake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile in 1960, killing 1665 people. Waves from the magnitude-9.5 quake killed about 140 people in Japan, 61 in Hawaii and 32 in the Philippines.

That tsunami measured between one and four metres in height, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, sparked by a sea quake off Indonesia, killed about 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean, including 160,000 in Aceh and 5400 in Thailand.

US National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Lau told AFP in Washington: '''It [the Chile tsunami] will stop once it hits the land masses on the other side of the Pacific, in Asia. The wave is spread out across the entire body of water in the Pacific''

Authorities in Hawaii, the US state where the warning centre is based, urged residents to take the threat seriously.