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Aftershocks keep quake-hit Japan peninsula on edge
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Aftershocks keep quake-hit Japan peninsula on edge
Aftershocks jolted the west coast of central Japan yesterday, keeping residents on edge a day after a strong earthquake killed one person, injured nearly 200 and flattened homes.
Sunday morning’s 6.9 magnitude quake, which struck the Noto peninsula in Ishikawa prefecture, about 300 km (190 miles) west of Tokyo, destroyed houses, buckled roads, triggered landslides and cut off water and electricity supplies to thousands of homes.
A 5.3 magnitude tremor, one of more than 175 aftershocks, struck early yesterday, and a 4.8 magnitude quake jolted the area in midafternoon, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said.
Officials warned that more could occur. About 2,600 people spent the night in evacuation shelters and many other residents slept in their cars. “The aftershocks are scary, so I spent last night in an evacuation centre,” said 83-year-old Kiyo Kawaguchi, surveying the damage to her home in the rural city of Wajima, one of the hardest hit areas.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a parliamentary panel in Tokyo that 68 houses, many of them old wooden structures with heavy tile roofs, had been destroyed and another 164 badly damaged. The government’s disaster agency put the total number of damaged houses at 564 and public broadcaster NHK said more than 10,000 households lacked running water.
An emergency relief team of firefighters that had been searching the rubble of collapsed houses confirmed that no one was trapped, an Ishikawa prefecture official said. The Meteorological Agency, using an early warning system that detects smaller tremors before a main quake hits, issued a tsunami alert on Sunday about 100 seconds after the quake, about two minutes faster than previously.
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