A series of strong quakes shook the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido yesterday, collapsing the roof of an airport control tower, setting fire to an oil refinery tank and driving 40,000 people from their homes.
More than 400 people were injured. Officials issued tidal wave warnings as Japan's Meteorological Agency measured the initial quake at 8 on the Richter scale -- stronger than previous killer earthquakes -- and warned after-shocks might last 10 days.
"The tremor was so strong that I could not keep standing," a man told public broadcaster NHK outside his home, its windows shattered by the quake.
PHOTO: AP
"Everything was falling over in the house," another man at a hospital said. "A shelf hit my wife on the back."
Japan is one of the world's most seismically active areas, with an earthquake occurring every five minutes.
The only death reported was that of a 61-year-old man struck by a car as he picked up broken beer bottles on the street, officials said. Public broadcaster NHK said 479 people were injured in the area, which is sparsely populated.
Police said two men fishing by a riverbank at the time of the quake were missing, and added that they might have been swept away by tidal waves.
The airport in the eastern town of Kushiro had to be closed for three hours after the ceiling of the control tower collapsed. Part of the ceiling of the passenger terminal also fell in, exposing the metal beams.
Elsewhere, roads and buildings cracked, roof tiles fell and gravestones tumbled. A storage tank at an oil refinery caught fire and the plant had to be closed.
Quake-generated waves measuring about 1m in height struck the eastern Hokkaido coast, washing away some empty cars, but no major wave damage was reported.
More than 40,000 people had left their homes in response to the tidal wave threat, Kyodo news agency said, but the warnings were lifted last night.
The focus of the first quake -- felt in Tokyo about 975km to the south -- was 42km below the seabed in the Pacific Ocean near the port of Erimo.
A second quake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale jolted Hokkaido about an hour later, followed by another measuring 7.1.
The first quake struck at 4:50am while most people were sleeping. Many said they were shocked by its power.
Roads were closed and rail services halted in many areas after one person was injured when a passenger train derailed.
Officials at Hokkaido Electric Power Co were quoted by Kyodo as saying that 24,300 homes near Kushiro lost power. NHK said Hokkaido Electric's Tomari nuclear power station was unaffected.
A fire broke out in a storage tank at an oil refinery owned by Idemitsu Kosan Co in Tomakomai, a coastal city in southern Hokkaido, sending flames and black smoke spewing into the sky.
The fire was put out around midday but the refinery remained closed for safety checks, Idemitsu said.
The latest earthquake follows one measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale that hit the northeastern prefecture of Miyagi in July, injuring around 500 people. Miyagi was also struck by an estimated 7.0 earthquake in May that injured more than 100 people.
Tsuneo Katayama, a seismologist and president of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, said the quake was unlikely to be a trigger for larger ones.
"There's no real connection between this earthquake and the possibility of a larger one, say in a place such as Tokyo. The location is totally different," Katayama said.
He added that it was not particularly significant that there had been three earthquakes in northern Japan since May.
"In a seismically active place like this, it's not strange to go through a period where there are several small earthquakes close together about once every 10 years," he said. "Just one of the things we have to put up with for living here."
Hokkaido, about the size of Austria, is the second largest of Japan's four main islands and has a population of more than 5 million. The capital, Sapporo, hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics.
Japanese still have vivid memories of an earthquake in the western city of Kobe that killed more than 6,400 people eight years ago. That quake measured 7.2 on the Richter scale.
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