Residents were ordered to evacuate as a massive storm pounded the rural western coast of Alaska on Wednesday with hurricane-force gusts and severe coastal flooding, US meteorologists said.
The storm, some 600-800 miles across, was "record or near record," said Bob Fisher, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, adding that the storm threat had not yet reached its peak.
"There have been some mandatory evacuations of some very low lying areas in Nome," a city near the far northwestern tip of the US state, across the Bering Sea from Russia's Far East.
One entire village, Gullivan, east of Nome, has been evacuated to higher ground, he told AFP, adding that winds were gusting up to 70 miles per hour, and that the flood threat was set to peak later in the day at high tide.
"It's not over yet. At Nome we expect the highest water level to be this evening," he said, adding that water levels should start receding again after midnight (0700 GMT Thursday).
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the sparsely populated western coast, and Alaska's main population centers, including Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks, are far from the path of the storm.
Fisher added that the storm was probably the biggest since 1974, but it was difficult to compare — the current storm was unusual in that it was threatening land as well as sea.
"Lots of times these big storms stay out over the water," he said, adding: "It's a storm which would be experienced only very rarely in western and northwest Alaska .. Certainly this would probably be a near record or record event."
