Beleaguered Tokyo Electric Power yesterday said it had begun a power outage in an area covering some parts of Tokyo and eight prefectures, affecting about 333,000 households.
Authorities have announced plans for scheduled rolling power cuts in areas served by TEPCO to make up for the loss of power from crippled nuclear plants, including the Tokyo utility’s troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi facility.
The outage began at about 5pm and was expected to last about two hours. A TEPCO official told reporters that affected areas included some municipalities in Ibaraki Prefecture, east of Tokyo, and Shizuoka, southwest of the capital.
The power outages did not affect central Tokyo, where people swarmed local convenience stores, stripping shelves of water, toilet rolls, bread, flashlights and instant noodles to take home.
“Bread and cup noodles are selling out all the time,” a -FamilyMart convenience store manager said in Tokyo. “Customers are bulk buying as many as 10 or 20 cup noodles at one time. It’s first come, first served. All the bread sold out early this morning.”
At a Lawson convenience store in Tokyo, the empty shelves were explained by a simple note.
“We have prioritized on supplying food to the areas affected by the earthquake,” the note read.
Japan, which records 20 percent of the world’s major earthquakes, generates about 30 percent of its power from about 50 nuclear plants. An explosion rocked a building housing a nuclear reactor at TEPCO’s quake-damaged Japanese power plant yesterday, the second such blast in two days, and the cooling system failed at a third reactor.
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