Uo one was killed and more than 100 others injured when a strong 7.4 magnitude earthquake rocked eastern Japan on Wednesday evening (March 16), prompting a tsunami warning on the country’s northeast coast. The quake derailed a train, causing no casualties, opened cracks in highways and toppled displays in stores. But the damage seemed relatively minor compared to the power of the quake which mainly affected Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures in northeastern Japan. Thursday morning, Hirokazu Matsuno, government spokesman, reported 4 dead and 107 injured.
The tremor, which occurred Wednesday evening at 11:36 p.m. and was strongly felt including in Tokyo, deprived more than two million homes of electricity, including nearly 700,000 in the Japanese capital. Small aftershocks were recorded throughout the night. Evacuation instructions to refuges have been issued in certain localities. Some 156,000 homes were also without electricity in the northeast of the country. The JR East railway company, which serves northeastern Japan, has announced significant disruptions to its network. Tepco is carrying out checks on its facilities, including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged by a gigantic tsunami caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake in 2011. According to local authorities, the earthquake did not cause faults on the control unit.
A country accustomed to tremors
Located at the crossroads of several major tectonic plates, Japan is regularly hit by earthquakes and has strict construction standards so that its buildings are able to withstand strong tremors. The country observed a minute’s silence last Friday in memory of the 2011 disaster, which left more than 18,500 people dead and missing and forced more than 165,000 people in Fukushima Prefecture to evacuate their homes due to radioactive emissions from the damaged power plant, where the cores of three nuclear reactors had melted. Local authorities still count 33,365 displaced people today, 80% of whom live outside the department of Fukushima.