Japan: more than 100 injured after earthquake off Fukushima

TOKYO (AFP) .- More than a hundred people were injured Japan because of earthquake 7.3 magnitude off Fukushima, in the northeast of the country, almost a decade after the tsunami that caused a nuclear disaster in the region. The tremor, which occurred shortly after 11 p.m. local time yesterday, caused 114 injured in the region, including six seriously, but also in the surroundings of Phone, as reported by authorities today.

The earthquake did not cause a tsunami, despite being followed by several aftershocks overnight. This morning, there were no deaths or major material damage. No anomalies were detected either in the nuclear power plants in the affected areas, shaken by the 2011 disaster.

On March 11 of the same year, a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a gigantic tsunami caused 18,000 deaths and disappearances and severely damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. According to the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), Yesterday’s quake is a distant aftershock of the 2011 earthquake. The epicenter stood at 60 kilometers deep in the Pacific Ocean already on 60 kilometers from the shores of Fukushima, according to the JMA.

“I was in the house. The shaking was so strong that I really feared for my safety ”, Masami Nakai, a municipal official in the small town of Soma, in the department of Fukushima, told AFP news agency. “The first earthquake seemed stronger to me than what I felt in 2011,” he told Kyodo Tomoko Kobayashi, who works in a shelter in Minamisoma, in the same area.

Today in the morning, the electricity supply was practically restored to 100%, after nearly a million homes were without electricity the day before. For the time being, the main visible material damage was a landslide that damaged a road in Fukushima county. Aerial television footage also showed another landslide on a race track in a remote location. High-speed rail links (Shinkansen) in northern Japan remained suspended to examine the condition of the infrastructure.

The Japanese authorities have urged the population to “Extreme caution” because there could be more aftershocks in the coming days and why increase the risk of landslides with rains forecast for Monday in the region. “Especially in the next two or three days there could be very strong earthquakes”, government spokesman Katsunobu Kato warned.

The government continued to assess the damage today. At present, he has reported eight damaged structures, mostly houses. Local media reported on dozens of buildings with collapsed roofs and shattered pipes. Members of the Japanese Self-Defense Force were dispatched to the affected areas to distribute water to the 4,800 households without access to running water, Kato clarified. More than 250 people took refuge in the evacuation centers during the night, but most have already returned home, he added.

Saturday’s earthquake came at a time when Japan is trying to contain the spread of the coronavirus, while preparing for the Olympics, scheduled for July 23 to August 8, after being postponed last year due to the pandemic. The American laboratory Pfizer, whose Covid-19 vaccine was the first to be cleared in Japan today, told the government that their storage centers were not affected by the earthquake, said the spokesperson.

Japan is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the areas with the highest seismic activity on the planet. However, its building standards are strict so that the buildings can withstand strong earthquakes.

THE NATION

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