A powerful earthquake and tsunami struck the tiny Solomon Islands yesterday, swallowing entire villages and killing at least 13 people with many more missing.

The shallow quake, with a magnitude of at least 8.0, leveled buildings and damaged a hospital on Gizo island northwest of the Solomons capital, Honiara. A tsunami that witnesses described as the height of a two-story building sucked homes into the sea as thousands of panicked residents fled for higher ground.

At least seven people died in Gizo, many trapped in their homes when waves swept through the town. Other bodies could be seen but not reached because of huge waves crashing ashore, the government said in a statement.

"The wave was up to 10 meters high in some villages," Solomon Islands' chief government spokesman Alfred Maesulia said. "Some villages have been entirely washed away."

The quake struck 350 km northwest of Honiara in the morning and sparked a tsunami alert around the Pacific.

The alert was lifted about nine hours later, with damage confined to the immediate area around the quake.

Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said the disaster could have been worse if it had happened only a few hours earlier, in darkness, when more people would have been asleep.

Government and Red Cross disaster teams are taking tents, food and water to the area, Sogavare said. Australia, which said the wave also hit the western Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville, has offered A$2 million ($1.6 million) in aid.

"The water just came up about 4 to 5 meters above sea level and kind of just went up into the communities and doused everything," Danny Kennedy, a dive shop owner and provincial politician of Gizo, told Reuters.

The initial tremor was followed around seven minutes later by a second one, centred further west, of magnitude 6.7. Gary Gibson, who chairs the International Seismological Centre Executive Committee, said the quake was the biggest to hit the Solomons since 1900.

"An earthquake of this size would involve a rupture of more than 10,000 square km of fault area ... about 100 km by 100 km," he said.

But he said the quake was much smaller than the 1,300-km-long rupture in December 2004 off Indonesia's Sumatra island.

Kevin McCue, the Director of the Australian Seismological Centre, said there was a strong chance more quakes would follow in coming days on an undersea trench west of the Solomons.

The Solomon Islands lies on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire" where volcanic activity and earthquakes are fairly common. The islands are popular with international travelers for scuba diving. Most homes in the mountainous islands are constructed of timber and bamboo.

Source: China Daily/agencies