Two dead in quake
AFP
http://www.iol.co.za
Monday, July 16, 2007

A powerful earthquake rattled Japan on Monday, killing two
people and injuring more than 260 others as it toppled
houses, triggered mudslides and set off a blaze at a
nuclear power plant.

In the hardest-hit areas northwest of the capital Tokyo,
houses were reduced to rubble and a bridge was nearly
cracked in two by the force of the mid-morning quake, which
had a magnitude of 6.8.

"I felt myself swaying from side to side. I was in shock,"
said Hitomi Mitsui, a 23-year-old businesswoman in Nagano,
a city in Japan's central mountains that suffered some
damage.

The government set up a crisis management centre after the
quake, which was strong enough to shake skyscrapers in the
capital more than 200km away from the epicentre.

Monday was a bank holiday in Japan, so financial markets
were closed.

Officials said they were hunting for survivors after the
quake, which triggered 50-centimetre (20-inch) tsunami
waves that hit the Japanese coast within minutes. Several
aftershocks followed.

"When the earthquake hit, I was out on my boat and I felt
this swing," said Susumu Ishiguro, the owner of a fishing
gear shop in the worst-hit city of Kashiwazaki on the Sea
of Japan (East Sea).

"I came back to the port and I found my house was a
complete mess. I think all the old houses got crushed," he
said by telephone.

Service on Japan's famed bullet trains was temporarily
suspended as a precaution while Niigata airport temporarily
closed its runways to check for damage.

Television footage showed flames shooting out of a nuclear
power plant in Kashiwazaki although there was no apparent
risk of a radiation leak.

Plant officials said the fire broke out in the area that
supplies electricity to the facility and that the four
reactors automatically shut down following the jolt.

"The fire occurred at a transformer, which is not located
close to the reactors," said Yasushi Hasegawa, an official
of the firm that runs the facility.

Two women, both in their 80s, died after sustaining
injuries in the quake, said an official at Kashiwazaki Chuo
Hospital.

Another 260 people were injured and 440 others were
evacuated to shelters, public broadcaster NHK said. Some
21,000 households suffered power cuts.

The quake also triggered mudslides in Kashiwazaki, where
soil was already loose after a major typhoon at the
weekend, which left four people dead or missing and flooded
hundreds of homes across Japan.

On the Japanese scale which measures seismic intensity, the
earthquake registered upper-six out of seven, meaning it
has the potential to knock over furniture and break window-
panes.

Japan lies at the junction of four tectonic plates and
endures about 20 percent of the world's most powerful
earthquakes.

Niigata was the scene of a major earthquake in October
2004, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. Sixty-seven
people were killed, including those who suffered stress and
fatigue afterwards.

The 2004 Niigata earthquake was Japan's deadliest since
January 1995, when a 7.3-magnitude tremor destroyed much of
the western metropolis of Kobe, killing more than 6,400
people.

More at:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=nw200707160...