Wednesday night’s tremor collapsed parts of houses, opened cracks in the roads and derailed a train, in which fortunately there were no casualties.
The damage seems relatively minor compared to the power of the earthquake, which mainly affected the departments of Fukushima and Miyagiin northeastern Japan.
A government spokesman, Hirokazu Matsuno, had initially said Thursday that four people were killed and 107 wounded.
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the tremor occurred on Wednesday at 11:36 p.m. (2:36 p.m. GMT) and was of magnitude 7.4 (revaluated compared to 7.3 initially).
The epicenter was 60 kilometers deep under the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Fukushima, where a nuclear power plant was devastated by a tsunami in 2011.
The JMA issued a warning of waves up to a meter high but waves of 30 cm were finally recorded in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, according to the agency, which had asked residents to move away from the seafront.
The tsunami alert was lifted on Thursday morning.
“Police and rescue services have received many calls in Fukushima and Miyagi,” Matsuno said overnight, urging people to remain vigilant for new tremors.
As well small aftershocks throughout the night and in some localities, evacuation orders were issued to shelters.
At an evacuation center in the city of Soma (Fukushima) where dozens of residents had taken refuge, Yuzuru Kobashi, 82, told AFP that he had come to collect tarps with his wife to protect their earthquake-damaged house.
In Ishinomaki, a rescuer explained to AFP that he was woken up by “an extremely violent tremor”.
“I heard the rumble of the ground. Instead of feeling fear, the memory of the earthquake” of 2011 came to me, he added.
The tremor, which was felt strongly even in tokyoinitially left more than two million households in the capital and neighboring departments without power, according to Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), but power was fully restored a few hours later.
Some 2,500 households were still without power in the country’s northeast on Thursday, according to Tohoku Electric Power.
The JR East railway company reported interruptions in its network. A ‘shinkansen’, Japan’s high-speed train, derailed north of the city of Fukushima with 78 people on boardbut there were no injuries.
Japan observed a minute of silence last Friday in memory of the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.
That catastrophe left more than 18,500 dead and missing, mainly due to the tsunami, and forced more than 165,000 people in Fukushima prefecture to evacuate their homes due to radioactive emissions.
Source: Ambito
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