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SCMP Reporter

MORE than 150 Hong Kong visitors to the tiny western Pacific island of Guam were among the survivors last night of one of the world's biggest recorded earthquakes.

  The quake - the strongest anywhere in the past four years at 8.1 on the Richter scale - hit the island at 6.35 pm (4.35 pm Hong Kong time).

  The quake, also felt on the island of Saipan, was the largest since an 8.2 tremor in the South Pacific near the McQuarie islands in May 1989.

  Officials said at least 48 people had been injured, but there was no official report of deaths. However, residents contacted by the South China Morning Post said they feared people had been killed.

  The island was being battered by heavy rains from Typhoon Steve when the quake struck.

  The ground shook violently for about a minute. Aftershocks, milder than the first, continued to rock the island at intervals of 15 to 30 minutes.

  The Palm Resort was severely damaged with one of its floors collapsing and the Pacific Isl and Club suffered ''serious structural damage''.

  The resort could not be contacted last night, but the club, its twin high-rise towers still intact, said about 150 of its 1,520 guests, then huddling together in the club's glass-strewn lobby, were from Hong Kong.

  It is not known how many Hong Kong visitors were staying in the resort, nor if any were injured, but Micronesia has become a popular destination from the territory.

  A spokesman for the Guam Governor's office, Mark Forbes, said several hotels were severely damaged.

  The Royal Observatory in Hong Kong said the quake had been centred 88 kilometres northeast of Agana, the island's capital.

  A club staff member, Maeze Horgan, said guests were huddling in the club's lobby and ground-floor restaurant, trying to keep dry as lashing rains swept through the building's shattered windows.

  Bedded down on inflatable rubber mats taken from the club's water slide and wrapped in an odd assortment of towels and blankets, they were shaken but unharmed. A few guests had suffered cuts to their feet as they ran from their rooms in the club's two high-rise towers.

  Continental Airways, which flies directly from Hong Kong to Guam, had resumed flights late last night.

  ''There's been a lot of damage and a lot of deaths,'' Ms Horgan said, adding that guests had been receiving information about the quake on local radio.

  ''A lot of people don't have water or electricity and there's a lot of flooding. We're in the middle of a tropical storm.''   She said the hotel had plunged into darkness when the quake hit, confusing and panicking the guests, many of whom were eating in the club's Skylight Restaurant.

  ''Everything went all over the place, including the food.

  ''Glass shattered around them. They just had to sit there,'' she said.

  The club's emergency fire sprinklers burst into operation, saturating the guests and adding to the confusion. Maids were thrown off their feet as they were making up beds.

  ''I think everybody, once they found it was an eight on the Richter scale, I think they are all pretty happy to be alive,'' Ms Horgan said.

  The club was equipped with its own emergency power generator but surrounding buildings were still without electricity at midnight.

  She said it was fortunate the club was built to withstand typhoons.

  ''It's very, very lucky that Guam gets a lot of typhoons so a lot of the buildings were designed for that,'' she said.

  ''Right now though we think there is a lot of structural damage to both towers so all guests are not going back to their rooms until we have an evaluation.''    At the Nikko hotel, about 200 Japanese guests refused to return to their rooms. Some preferred to lie on the floors of the lobby (Cont'd on Page 10, Col 7) (Cont'd From Page 1) while others stayed in the car park. In other hotels, guests slept in ballrooms.

  ''I thought we were going to die,'' said Nilisa Arnold, 12 weeks pregnant, who was inside a Catholic church in Agana.

  ''I was saying, ''God, God, God, help us. My God, please for the sake of my baby, stop it now'.''   Mr Forbes denied earlier reports, attributed to civil defence officials, that Governor Ada had asked US President Bill Clinton to declare Guam a disaster area.

   ''When daylight comes, the Governor will be conducting an assessment of the damage . . . and, based on that determination, will decide whether or not to ask for a declaration,'' he said.

    ''It is a total disaster for the visitor industry,'' Manfred Pieper, chairman of the Guam Hotel and Restaurant Association said in a statement to the local newspaper, the Pacific Daily News.

  Tourism is Guam's top private industry, with about 700,000 visitors, 85 per cent of them Japanese, each year.

    The US Geological Survey in Colorado classed the quake in Guam as a ''great earthquake'', a category for all tremors above eight.



HK visitors survive massive earthquake in Guam