Rescuers were on Wednesday morning searching for people potentially trapped under the rubble of a shopping center in Japan following a strong earthquake that left one dead and more than 100 injured.
• Also read: Magnitude 7.1 earthquake hits southwest Japan
Private television channel TBS announced that a “considerable number” of people may have lost their lives inside the badly damaged shopping complex located in Kashima, a suburb of Kumamoto in the southwest of the archipelago.
As night fell, regional authorities mentioned the number of ten missing in this disaster, public television channel NHK reported.
AFP
Previously, the police had told him that it was impossible to contact between 20 and 30 employees of this shopping center.
Firefighters reported that the first floor of the building collapsed during the earthquake on Tuesday at 4:27 p.m. (local time) on the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands making up the Japanese archipelago.
Its magnitude was 7.1, according to the Japanese meteorological agency JMA, and 6.8, according to the USGS, the American Geological Institute. Its A level was also the highest (7) on a separate scale used in Japan, which measures the strength with which earthquakes are felt in a given location, the JMA said.
A series of aftershocks followed, including one with a magnitude of 6.1 at 5:08 p.m.
A tsunami warning was issued and then quickly lifted.
The “tireless” work of rescuers
Late Tuesday, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi promised that rescue teams would work “tirelessly” through the night, with the priority “rescuing and bringing to safety those affected.”
The Japanese army mobilized 3,600 people for relief operations and dispatched 20 planes to assess the damage.
AFP
Several people were also missing at a factory in the town of Yatsushiro, a little further south, where the top of a chimney fell, according to NHK.
One person was killed in the collapse of a house in the same department of Kumamoto, Kyodo said.
NHK broadcast footage from other areas in the region showing several fires, damaged bridges, a derailed freight train and homes threatening to collapse.
At least a hundred injured
“The shock was quite strong and lasted a long time. I was terrified,” Chiharu Hara, 35, on a business trip to Kumamoto, told AFP. “The building swayed violently. I was afraid he was going to collapse. Everyone panicked. »
“The shaking was so strong that I couldn’t stand,” said an NHK employee at the scene.
In images verified by AFP, we can see heavy goods vehicles, lamp posts and traffic lights undergoing strong oscillations for around twenty seconds.
Separately, on a two-lane road in Kumamoto Prefecture, vehicles were traveling cautiously on distorted sections of roadway.
Many roads have been closed and the operation of high-speed trains (Shinkansen) has been suspended in this region. Kumamoto airport was reopened in the evening.
Two hospitals reported treating at least 50 injured each, according to NHK.
“People are arriving with burns and fractures after being trapped under objects during the earthquake and ambulances are continually bringing in injured people,” explained a hospital staff member quoted by the same television channel.
NHK also reported that around ten people were injured in a retirement home.
AFP
Deadly earthquakes
However, no immediate anomaly was noted in the region’s nuclear power plants, assured the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority.
Some 45,000 homes and facilities were deprived of electricity in the Kumamoto department, noted the Kyushu Electric Power company.
In 2016, two devastating earthquakes – one of magnitude 6.5, followed two days later by another of magnitude 7.3 – hit Kumamoto. They left 273 dead and more than 2,800 injured.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake also hit northern Japan on June 25, without causing any deaths or significant damage.
Situated at the junction of four major tectonic plates along the western edge of the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, Japan is one of the countries most prone to earthquakes.
With around 125 million inhabitants, it generally records several hundred seismic tremors each year, around 18% of the earthquakes recorded in the world.
The vast majority of them are of low intensity, even if the damage they cause varies depending on their location and the depth at which they occur below the earth’s surface.
Japan remains marked by the gigantic underwater earthquake, magnitude 9, which occurred in 2011, which triggered a tsunami that left some 18,500 people dead or missing and caused the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
