“I was on the second floor of a two-story house and I couldn’t stay still, it was very extreme.”
Restoring power In the town of Shiroishi, workers were cleaning up the mess at a supermarket, including products that fell from shelves and a collapsed ceiling. “It’s really ironic.
Exactly a year ago we also had an earthquake of a similar magnitude,” store worker Yoshinari Kiwaki told AFP. “
When we felt the tremor last night, we already knew what we had to work on here tomorrow morning,” said the 62-year-old. It will take about a month before the store is operational again. The tremors also rocked the capital, temporarily plunging parts of Tokyo and other regions into darkness.
Power outages hit around two million homes in Tokyo and elsewhere immediately after the quake, but power was gradually restored overnight. Around 30,000 homes were still without power and another 4,300 without water Thursday morning.
Damage was reported elsewhere, including the collapse of a stone wall on the grounds of Sendai’s Aoba Castle and a derailed Shinkansen bullet train north of Fukushima city.
No one was injured in the derailment, but 75 passengers and three employees on board were stranded for four hours before they were able to exit the train.
Japan sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Basin.
The country is regularly hit by earthquakes, but the memory of the 2011 disaster that left 18,500 people dead or missing, most of them due to the tsunami, still haunts them.
Extensive decontamination has been carried out around the destroyed Fukushima facility and exclusion zones now cover only 2.4% of the region, down from 12% previously, although the population of many towns is far below what ‘she was.
