Fukushima shaken again
TOKYO — A large earthquake shook a broad area across eastern Japan late Saturday, with its epicenter off the coast of Fukushima, near where three nuclear reactors melted down after a quake and tsunami nearly 10 years ago.
The earthquake left nearly 1 million households without power across the Fukushima region and forced the closure of roads and suspension of train services. While rattled residents awaited aftershocks, a landslide cut off a chunk of a main artery through Fukushima prefecture.
Japan’s meteorological service reported the quake’s magnitude as 7.3, up from the initial report of 7.1, but said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Hitting a little less than a month before the 10th anniversary of what is known as the Great East Japan earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, the quake rattled the greater Tokyo area for about 30 seconds starting at 11:08 p.m. and was felt in Fukushima and Sendai.
The strong temblor was a reminder of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011, killing 16,000 people. After the subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, 160,000 people fled or were evacuated from around the plant.
Saturday’s quake struck as Tokyo and nine other large prefectures are under a state of emergency to contain the coronavirus. Residents are encouraged to work from home and avoid going out at night, while restaurants and bars are closed at 8 each night.
Japan also is preparing to host the summer Olympics, postponed by a year from 2020. The games are scheduled to open on July 23.
The prime minister’s office immediately set up a crisis management office and Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the nuclear plants, said that it was checking its monitoring posts in Fukushima to ensure that there were no radiation leaks.
Shortly after midnight, public broadcaster NHK reported that Tokyo Electric Power had detected “no major abnormalities” at any of the Daiichi reactors where the meltdowns occurred in 2011 or at the Daini plant a few miles away in Fukushima.
There was no immediate information about the hundreds of tanks filled with contaminated water stored on the Daiichi site. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant on the west coast had suffered no damage, NHK reported.
According to Katsunobu Kato, chief Cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, about 950,000 households were left without power across the affected areas. He said that several thermal power plants had been taken offline. Several bullet train lines were suspended. People were evacuated to shelters in several cities in Fukushima.
Speaking on NHK, Takashi Furumura, a professor at the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, warned that a quake of this size could be followed within two or three days by another of similar scale.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake’s epicenter was about 37 miles off the coast of Fukushima and about 34 miles deep. On land, the strongest magnitude felt was 6-plus.
Speaking at a news conference, an official for the meteorological agency said residents should be prepared for aftershocks as strong as magnitude-6 in the coming days.
In Minami Soma, one of the Fukushima villages evacuated after the nuclear disaster in 2011, NHK reported that severe horizontal shaking lasted for about 30 seconds Saturday.
Kyodo News reported that 30 people had been injured in the Fukushima and Miyagi regions, both on Japan’s east coast.
Roughly a dozen powerful earthquakes have struck Japan in the past decade, several of them triggering tsunamis and landslides that have shaken parts of the country and destroyed countless buildings.