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Teams search for Japan quake victims

Vehicles pass by an abandoned building with a broken window in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, northern Japan, yesterday. PHOTO: EPA

Rescue teams searched in dense fog and rain yesterday for victims of a powerful earthquake in northern Japan that left more than 110 people injured, some of them seriously.

The 6.8-magnitude quake struck just after midnight on the mountainous northern tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu, shattering windows and triggering landslides in a region still recovering from a tremor one month ago.

A total of 116 people were injured, the national disaster agency said. Police said that 26 of them were in serious condition, some having broken bones as the quake threw them to the ground.

Military helicopters scoured the region famed for its blueberry fields and hot-spring resorts to find anyone who might have been trapped, but low visibility and light rain hampered the operations.

“I’ve never felt such a big earthquake before in my life,” said Kenji Sasaki, a disaster official in the town of Hirono, where the walls and ceilings of the municipal head office suffered cracks.

“I was asleep when I felt the jolt but for its entire duration I couldn’t move,” he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda also said he was startled in his bedroom by the quake, which was so powerful that it shook buildings in the capital some 500km to the south.

“As a nation we will promptly take appropriate measures,” Fukuda said. “However, it appears that the area is now foggy so it’s difficult to assess the situation by helicopters. We would like to clarify the situation as quickly as possible.”

Chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said there were no reports of deaths.

“In any case, our priority is to make every possible effort to grasp the situation concerning damage,” he told a news conference.

In the city of Hachinohe, the earthquake toppled gravestones at a cemetery, sending residents scurrying to repair damages out of respect to their ancestors, television footage showed.

In the small town of Iwaizumi, several big rocks about 3m wide had tumbled down to the side of a mountain trail. One boulder fell off a cliff, smashing through a guardrail on a road.

Police said two people were injured in the area — a 91-year-old woman who rushed outside and fell when the tremor struck and an eight-year-old girl who cut her feet on the shattered glass.

An aftershock registering 5.0 on the Richter scale hit early yesterday. But in a country used to earthquakes, authorities were quickly able to restore services.

“We had a water pipe break and the electricity was out for a while after the quake, but the problems are all fixed now,” a police officer in Iwaizumi said.

Japan, which lies at the crossing of four tectonic plates, experiences around 20 percent of the world’s powerful earthquakes.
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