A powerful earthquake registering 7.1 on the Richter scale has tragically claimed the lives of at least 13 individuals in the vicinity of Kumamoto, Japan’s southern city. Rescue teams are in a desperate race against time to find survivors trapped beneath the debris, according to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who provided updates on Wednesday.
“There are still people awaiting rescue, and time is of the essence. All available resources will be deployed on-site to maximize the number of people we can save,” Prime Minister Takaichi announced to the press at a briefing in Tokyo, following a grim update that raised the death toll from the three initially reported fatalities.
The earthquake resulted in widespread power outages, affecting thousands of households, and severely damaged numerous roads throughout the region.
Early Wednesday morning, emergency crews rescued eight individuals from beneath the rubble of a partially destroyed shopping center. Sadly, two young women in their twenties lost their lives when an unexplained explosion, occurring about an hour post-quake, shattered the mall.
Local media sources indicate that authorities are currently exploring the possibility that a gas explosion may have been responsible.
Emergency fire rescue teams, police and army personnel were focusing on areas of the building where calls for help had been received.
The full extent of the disaster remained unclear.
Around 20 to 30 mall workers were unaccounted for on Tuesday, public broadcaster NHK said. Seven people are also missing after a chimney collapsed at a Nippon Paper Industries factory, while four others are seriously injured, a local government official said. Hospitals were reported to be treating dozens of patients.
Across the prefecture, which also suffered a deadly earthquake a decade ago, around 260,000 people were instructed to go to evacuation centres, authorities said.
The quake’s epicentre was about 20km south of Kumamoto City, central Kyushu’s largest city, with a population of around 700,000.
Authorities have warned residents in the areas that felt the biggest tremors to be on alert for further strong quakes for about a week, as well as for the risk of landslides.
With more than 36,000 homes still without power, authorities are worried about the risk of heat stroke as temperatures soar to around 34C on Wednesday.
Some hospitals overstretched
One hospital in Uki city, near the epicentre, said a power outage caused by the earthquake meant it was unable to function.
“It’s become like a field hospital,” the head of the administrative department told NHK. Another hospital in the city said it had suspended admissions as it could no longer handle additional emergency cases after accepting 86 injured people following the quake, including three with serious injuries.
Several passengers aboard high-speed trains at the time of the quake were also injured, operators said.
But it was the AEON mall, the largest in the prefecture, that was the most eye-catching disaster.
One side of the mall, which houses around 200 stores, was torn away in the blast, exposing steel beams and strewing debris across a parking lot, footage showed.
A spokesperson for mall operator AEON said customers and employees were evacuated right after the initial quake and that the exact cause of the ensuing explosion was unclear.
AEON shares fell 1.9 per cent in early trading in Tokyo.
Some major companies with plants in the area, including Tokyo Electron, a semiconductor equipment maker, and Honda, said they would suspend operations at their plants through Wednesday.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, evacuated workers from its local plant as a precaution after the quake but said it had begun resuming operations late on Tuesday.
Some roads were also badly damaged, with large cracks splintering major highways and snarling traffic on Tuesday evening.
Located on the “Ring of Fire” of volcanoes and oceanic trenches partly encircling the Pacific Basin, Japan accounts for about 20per cent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or higher.
A massive earthquake in Kumamoto 10 years ago killed 275 people and injured a further 2,739, according to an official count, and damaged thousands of buildings, including the walls of the city’s castle, a top tourist site.
