Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Powerful earthquake sows chaos in Japan
SAPPORO, Japan — A powerful earthquake Thursday on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido triggered dozens of landslides that crushed houses under torrents of dirt, rocks and timber, prompting frantic efforts to unearth any survivors.
Officials say 16 people died or are presumed dead. At least 366 people were injured, five of them seriously.
Searchers were digging through the mountains of debris today near a small mountain town hoping to find survivors, with 26 people still unaccounted for after the magnitude-6.7 quake struck early Thursday.
After a day of island-wide blackouts that left nearly 3 million households without power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said today that power has been restored for nearly half of the homes.
Normal business on the island was paralyzed, as blackouts cut off water to homes, immobilized trains and airports that caused hundreds of flight cancellations, and shut down phone systems.
In the town of Atsuma, where entire hillsides collapsed, rescuers used small backhoes and shovels to search for survivors under the tons of earth that tumbled down steep mountainsides, burying houses and farm buildings below. The area’s deep green hills were marred by reddish-brown gashes where the soil tore loose under the violent tremors.
Atsuma Mayor Shoichiro Miyasaka said the town had emergency meals for up to 2,000 people and that more than 500 had sought refuge in its emergency shelters.
The landslides ripped through some homes and buried others.
The island’s only nuclear power plant, which was offline for routine safety checks, temporarily switched to a backup generator to keep its spent fuel cool. Nuclear regulators said there was no sign of abnormal radiation — a concern after a quake and tsunami in March 2011 that hit northeast Japan destroyed both external and backup power to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, causing meltdowns.
Japan’s Meteorological Agency said the quake’s epicenter was 24 miles deep. But it still wreaked havoc across much of the relatively sparsely inhabited island.
Many roads were closed and some were impassable. NHK showed workers rushing to clean up shattered glass and reinstall ceiling panels that had fallen in the region’s biggest airport at Chitose.
The quake came on the heels of a typhoon that lifted heavy trucks off their wheels and triggered major flooding in western Japan, leaving the main airport near Osaka and Kobe closed after a tanker rammed a bridge connecting the facility to the mainland. The summer also brought devastating floods and landslides from torrential rains in Hiroshima and deadly temperatures across the country.
Abe said that up to 25,000 troops and other personnel would be dispatched to Hokkaido to help with rescue operations.
As Japan’s northern frontier and a major farming region with rugged mountain ranges and vast forests, Hokkaido is an area accustomed to coping with long winters, isolation and other hardships. But the blackouts brought on by the quake underscored the country’s heavy reliance on vulnerable power systems: Without electricity, water was cut to many homes, train lines were idled and phone systems out of order.
In the prefectural capital of Sapporo, a city of 1.9 million, the quake ruptured roads and knocked houses askew. A mudslide left several cars half buried. By evening the city’s streets were dark and shops closed.
Utilities were starting up several other thermal and hydroelectric plants and power was restored to many households, but even with those stopgap supplies thousands will still be without electricity for some time.
Authorities sent power generator vehicles to hospitals and other locations and water tanker trucks to communities in Sapporo, where residents were collecting bottles to tide them over until electricity and tap water supplies come back online. Long lines of people waited to charge their cellphones at the city’s regional government office.
The quake’s impact was widespread. To the north, in the scenic town of Biei, residents lined up outside of supermarkets and convenience stores, quickly clearing shelves of water, toilet paper and food.
“Only a few cartons of instant ramen were left,” said Mika Takeda, who lives in the town of 10,000. The one gas station was limiting customers to only 5 gallons of gas, she said.