Massive quake hits Japan, 200-300 bodies found
Posted Mar 11, 2011 10:26:17 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TOKYO, Japan – A powerful 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck northeastern Japan, Friday, killing hundreds. The quake — the largest to hit the country since officials began keeping records in the late 1800s — was followed by a powerful tsunami.
- Anyone looking for information about Canadians in Japan can call Deparment of Foreign Affairs (DFAIT) at 1-800-387-3124 or e-mail sos@international.gc.ca.
- Google also launched its Person Finder application following the earthquake in Japan. It was tracking 3,700 records as of 7:15 a.m.
Japanese police said 200 to 300 bodies have been found in Sendai city, the closest major city to the epicenter. Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that 88,000 people are missing.
A massive tsunami hit the northeast coast, with waves coming almost 100 kilometres inland, pushing boats, houses and cars, and sweeping away a ship carrying 100 people and a train.
Watch tsunami hit Japan (courtesy of CNN):
A tsunami warning was issued for the entire Pacific, including areas as far away as South America, the entire U.S. West Coast, Canada and Alaska. A tsunami warning was extended to a number of Pacific, Southeast Asian and Latin American nations, including Russia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Chile. In the Philippines, authorities said they expect a one-meter high tsunami.
The 8.9-magnitude offshore quake struck at 2:46 p.m. (Tokyo time) and was followed by at least 19 aftershocks, most of them of more than magnitude 6.0.
Seismologists said the quake was 8,000 thousand times more powerful that the quake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, in February.
The quake struck at a depth of 10 kilometres, about 125 kilometres off the eastern coast, the agency said. The area is 380 kilometres northeast of Tokyo.
Dozens of cities and villages along a 2,100-kilometre stretch of coastline were shaken by violent tremors that reached as far away as Tokyo, hundreds of kilometres from the epicenter.
“The earthquake has caused major damage in broad areas in northern Japan,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said at a news conference.
The quake toppled cars off bridges, violently shaking buildings and triggering fires. About four million homes have no power.
Bloomberg News reported six Sony factories have been shut down in the northeast, and its not yet known word on when they can resume business.
Japanese authorities urged some 2,000 people living near a nuclear plant in Fukushima, at the epicentre of the quake, to leave the area. The plant was shut down after its cooling system failed, and a nuclear emergency has been declared. This was one of four plants shut down.
A large fire erupted at the Cosmo oil refinery in Ichihara city in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo and was burning out of control with 30 metre-high flames whipping into the sky.
In downtown Tokyo, large buildings shook violently and workers poured into the street for safety. TV footage showed a large building on fire and bellowing smoke in the Odaiba district of Tokyo. The tremor bent the upper tip of the iconic Tokyo Tower, a 1,093-foot steel structure inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Hamilton, Ont., lawyer Nile Morris works in Tokyo and told 680News the quake struck while he was at work on the top floor of a 19-story building.
“Nobody had experienced this magnitude of quake before, so people were fearing the worst I think, and as I said, everybody was scrambling to get under their desks and their tables in the office, and hoping that it wouldn’t be quite so bad,” he said.
He said it took him about two hours to walk home because everything is shut down in Tokyo, including transit.
Narita Airport has now partially resumed flights and reports suggest 10,000 people are stuck there. In central Tokyo, trains were stopped and passengers walked along the tracks to platforms.
Several quakes had hit the same region in recent days, including a 7.3 magnitude one on Wednesday.
Japan’s worst previous quake was in 1923 in Kanto, an 8.3-magnitude temblor that killed 143,000 people, according to USGS. A 7.2-magnitude quake in Kobe city in 1996 killed 6,400 people.
Japan lies on the “Ring of Fire” — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 per cent of the world’s quakes occur, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 nations. A magnitude-8.8 temblor that shook central Chile last February also generated a tsunami and killed 524 people.
