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Fears of a dev­as­tat­ing tsuna­mi fad­ed Wednes­day for the U.S. and Japan af­ter one of the strongest earth­quakes ever record­ed struck off a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed Russ­ian penin­su­la, but new alerts along South Amer­i­ca’s Pa­cif­ic coast forced evac­u­a­tions and closed beach­es.

Warn­ings in the first hours af­ter the 8.8 mag­ni­tude quake sent res­i­dents flee­ing to rooftops in Japan and forced tourists out of beach­front ho­tels in Hawaii, snarling is­land traf­fic. In Rus­sia, sev­er­al peo­ple were hurt rush­ing to get out of build­ings, in­clud­ing a hos­pi­tal pa­tient who jumped from a win­dow.

Mil­lions of peo­ple were told to move away from the shore or seek high ground be­cause they were po­ten­tial­ly in the path of the tsuna­mi waves, which struck sea­side ar­eas of Japan, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast but did not ap­pear to cause any ma­jor dam­age.