BAt least two people died and 126 were injured in the strong earthquake in the Fukushima area. This was reported by the Japanese television station NHK on Thursday morning (local time). An initially issued tsunami warning was lifted. According to the operator Tepco, the interim power failure in millions of households has also been repaired.
According to the government, there were no major irregularities in the nuclear ruins in Fukushima or another nearby nuclear power plant. The briefly failed cooling system in a cooling pond for used fuel rods of the second nuclear power plant Fukushima Daini twelve kilometers south of the nuclear ruins could be activated again.
Reports of two deaths
The severe tremors woke many people in the north-east of the country on Thursday night. A man in his 60s died in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, local media reported. An elderly man also died in the neighboring province of Miyagi as a result of the quake.
According to initial reports, houses and roads were damaged and goods fell off the shelves in shops. “I felt two strong tremors and saw parked cars bouncing up and down because the ground was shaking,” a security guard at Soma City Hall told Japan’s Kyodo news agency. Many injuries were reported from the coastal town. There were also injuries in distant regions of the country such as Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo and in Ibaraki, Akita and Yamagata Prefectures.
Shinkansen derailed
A high-speed train also derailed as a result of the quake – but the around 100 passengers on board the Shinkansen were unharmed, according to media reports. On Thursday morning (local time) it was not yet clear how long the repair work on the railway line would take.
The strong and unusually long-lasting tremors were also felt in other parts of Japan, including the capital Tokyo, 250 kilometers away. In the meantime, the power went out in more than 2.2 million households in the country, around 700,000 were affected in Tokyo alone.
The earthquake hit the country at 11:36 p.m. local time on Wednesday. The meteorological authority initially gave the magnitude as 7.3, but later corrected it to 7.4. The authority had also immediately warned of up to one meter high tsunami waves. However, the warning was lifted early Thursday morning (local time) after only relatively small tidal waves of 20 to 30 centimeters high were registered on the Pacific coast.
The Japanese were spared a tsunami catastrophe like that almost exactly eleven years ago, when around 20,000 people died and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant went into a super meltdown.
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