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.
PHOTO: EPA
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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS