Power was fully restored yesterday to slightly more than half a million homes across Tokyo that briefly suffered outages after a fire broke out at a Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) facility in the neighboring prefecture of Saitama.
The disruption affected government offices and brought some trains in the capital to a temporary halt.
As many as 580,000 homes were hit, a Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry spokeswoman said.
Photo: Reuters / Kyoto
The utility, which said that power was fully returned to those affected by 4:25pm, confirmed the ministry’s numbers at a news conference.
Television footage showed plumes of dense black smoke billowing from a facility in the city of Niiza in Saitama Prefecture.
The fire caused the shutdown of two Tokyo Electric substations in Tokyo, TEPCO spokeswoman Chisato Aoki said by telephone.
Arson has been ruled out, according to another company spokesman.
The utility said it is probing the cause of the fire.
The outage forced some government buildings in central Tokyo to switch to backup power, while operations on several subway lines were disrupted, according to NHK.
Local television showed long lines of commuters waiting at the Ikebukuro train station in northern Tokyo, one of largest transit centers in the metropolis.
NHK showed several car accidents and cited police reports saying that as many as 200 traffic lights had temporarily gone out throughout the capital.
TEPCO said the fire at its underground facility in Niiza had been suppressed by 6:40pm.
The incident is another blow to the utility that is struggling to put the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster of March 2011 behind it. TEPCO last week said that paying for the decommissioning of the crippled plant put it at risk of insolvency.
The March 2011 nuclear accident and its fallout will ultimately cost more than US$106 billion, according to a study by Japanese academics.
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