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Japan earthquake

Japan tsunami

TOKYO - rescuers struggled to reach victims on Saturday morning as Japan reeled after the earthquake and tsunami struck together deadly. An earthquake measuring 8.9 triggers massive tsunami that sent walls of water washing over coastal cities in the north. Concerns mounted over radiation leaks that may arise from two nuclear power plant near the quake zone.

The death toll from the tsunami and earthquakes, the strongest ever recorded in Japan, was in the hundreds, but the Japanese news media quoted officials saying that it could increase to more than 1,300, most of them drowned. About 200 to 300 bodies were found along the surface of the water in Sendai, a port city in northeastern Japan and major city closest to the epicenter.

Thousands of homes were destroyed, many roads are impassable, trains and buses are not running, and power and phones still down. On Saturday morning, the railway company JR says that there are three trains lost in the two northern prefectures.

While the loss of life and property may not be enough, many lives would be saved by the Japanese broad disaster preparedness and strict construction codes. Japan's economy was spared a more devastating punch because the earthquake struck away from the heart of the industry.

Japanese officials on Saturday issued broad evacuation orders for people living in the vicinity of two separate nuclear power plants that had experienced breakdowns in their cooling systems as a result of the earthquake, and they warned that small amounts of radiation could leak from both plants. Japanese television reported that officials said they had detected cesium near one of the reactors at one of the plants, and The Associated Press quoted a nuclear safety official as saying a meltdown was possible at that reactor.

On Friday, at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, the quake struck. First came the roar and rumble of the temblor, shaking skyscrapers, toppling furniture and buckling highways. Then waves as high as 30 feet rushed onto shore, whisking away cars and carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields and highways.

By Saturday morning, Japan was filled with scenes of desperation, as stranded survivors called for help and rescuers searched for people buried in the rubble. Kazushige Itabashi, an official in Natori City, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, said several districts in an area near Sendai’s airport were annihilated.

Rescuers found 870 people in one elementary school on Saturday morning and were trying to reach 1,200 people in the junior high school, closer to the water. There was no electricity and no water for people in shelters. According to a newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, about 600 people were on the roof of a public grade school, in Sendai City. By Saturday morning, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and firefighters had evacuated about 150 of them.

On the rooftop of Chuo Hospital in the city of Iwanuma, doctors and nurses were waving white flags and pink umbrellas, according to TV Asahi. On the floor of the roof, they wrote “Help” in English, and “Food” in Japanese. The reporter, observing the scene from a helicopter, said, “If anyone in the City Hall office is watching, please help them.”

The station also showed scenes of people stranded on a bridge, cut off by water on both sides near the mouth of the Abukuma River in Miyagi Prefecture.

People were frantically searching for their relatives. Fumiaki Yamato, 70, was in his second home in a mountain village outside of Sendai when the earthquake struck. He spoke from his car as he was driving toward Sendai trying to find the rest of his family. While it usually takes about an hour to drive to the city, parts of the road were impassable. “I’m getting worried,” he said as he pulled over to take a reporter’s call. “I don’t know how many hours it’s going to take.”

Japanese, accustomed to frequent earthquakes, were stunned by this one’s magnitude and the more than 100 aftershocks, many equivalent to major quakes.

Japan earthquake: nuclear disaster feared after power plant 'explosion'
Japan is battling to Avoid a nuclear disaster after an Explosion at a power plant in the Aftermath of the country's Biggest earthquake and a devastating tsunami.

The AFP reported that the explosion was heard and seen white smoke billowing into the air in one of two plants where the Japanese government has placed under state of emergency. Some workers were reported injured.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has warned that radiation leakage that may occur in one reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, 150 kilometers north of Tokyo, after an earthquake measuring 8.9 on Friday.

Reports of aftershocks followed the explosion and came as a major humanitarian operation got under way.

On Saturday morning, at least 1,300 people feared dead and international rescue teams began arriving

Reactor coolant system failed after the earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast, triggered a tsunami 33ft. The pressure in the reactor continued to increase after repeated efforts to return power to the cooling system failed. Radiation in factories surged to 1,000 times the normal levels, officials said, triggering the evacuation orders for residents.

Before the explosion workers had vented off steam in a bid to relieve pressure on the worst-hit reactor.

A second atomic plant in the earthquake-hit area was also experiencing reactor cooling problems. Workers were battling to cool and stabilise the cores of three reactors at the nearby Daini facility.

It was unclear to what extent the reactors’ external structures had been damaged, adding to uncertainty over the scale of any possible leak, and officials and scientists offered conflicting verdicts on the severity to public health.

There was “no immediate health hazard”, public broadcaster NHK announced, citing nuclear officials.

But the government ordered the evacuation of 45,000 people.

“The events that occurred at these plants, which is the loss of both offsite power and onsite power, is one of the rarest events to happen in a nuclear power plant, and all indications are that the Japanese do not have the situation under control,” said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based organisation.

“It’s a dice roll whether or not the containment will retain its integrity and prevent a large radiological release.”

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, predicted meltdown. “What we’re seeing, barring any information from the Japanese that they have it under control, is that we’re headed in that direction,” he said.

The “superquake” 81 miles out to sea triggered a tsunami that sent a 30ft wall of water crashing into Japan’s Pacific coast on Friday.

Police said 200 to 300 bodies were found in Sendai, 150 miles north of Tokyo. Another 151 were confirmed killed elsewhere, with 547 missing. At least 800 people were injured.

Fires caused by the tremor were burning in towns and cities along a 1,300-mile stretch of coastline. An oil refinery was one of dozens of buildings ablaze, as emergency workers struggled to cope with the scale of the disaster.

The earthquake was 1,000 times more powerful than the tremor that devastated Christchurch in New Zealand last month, and the world’s seventh biggest since records began.

Four million people were left without electricity amid the destruction in Tokyo alone.

The Foreign Office warned against all but essential travel to Tokyo.

Tourists were feared to be among those unaccounted for after a ship with 100 people on board was reported to have been lost at sea and two trains, one of them a bullet train carrying hundreds of passengers in the Miyagi region, were listed as missing. The Foreign Office said it had been contacted by 400 British families concerned that they had been unable to get in touch with relatives in Japan, but had no information on any British casualties.

Initially, more than 3,000 people living within two miles of the plant were evacuated, with those within a seven-mile radius told to stay indoors. But with a third of the town underwater after a nearby dam burst and radiation levels continuing to rise, officials warned of a leak and tripled the safety cordon to six miles.

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said if the cooling systems were not repaired within 24 hours, the plant risked a “definite danger of a core meltdown".

He said the “ultimate worst-case” was a “Chernobyl scenario” with explosions destroying the reactor and sending a “deadly plume” of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

At first, the government insisted there was no risk of a leak from the plant and that everything was “under control”, despite the failure of the cooling system. But a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the plant, admitted later that there was a problem.

“Pressure has risen in the container of the reactor and we are trying to deal with it,” he said.

His comments were followed by a statement from Japan’s nuclear safety agency saying radioactive vapour would be released to ease the pressure in the reactor, which had risen to one and a half times the norm.

Then came an admission from Japan’s trade minister that “a small radiation leak” could occur at the plant.

Millions of Japanese prepared to spend an uneasy night in fear of a further major tremor as more than 50 aftershocks were reported. The worst affected area appeared to be in and around the sprawling port of Sendai, where the tsunami swallowed everything in its path, churning up houses, cars, trees and boats before dumping them several miles inland.

Seismologists picked up the first signs of the tremor in time for broadcasters to put out an emergency warning one minute before it shook northern Japan, giving millions of people time to take cover.

Japan, which sits at the junction of three continental plates on the Pacific “ring of fire”, experiences up to 2,000 noticeable tremors every year. Newer buildings are designed to withstand even the biggest earthquakes. But nothing could prepare the country for the tsunami which followed minutes later. Television news helicopters captured footage of an unstoppable tide of sludge as it spread across the parched rice fields around Sendai like ink spilt on paper.

Houses, cars, trees and anything else that stood in the way were churned up and became part of the advancing morass, adding to its destructive power as it moved hundreds of yards inland.

Footage showed drivers jumping out of their cars on a bridge in the city and watching as the water of the harbour surged up the main bridge piles, dismasting several large fishing boats as they were driven forward by the tide and crushed beneath the concrete arches.

Some of those stranded in the upstairs rooms in their homes waved white sheets out of windows, desperate to attract the attention of helicopters hovering overhead.

The family of Hannah Craggs, a 27-year-old English teacher who works in Sendai, said they feared for her safety last night after failing to make any contact with her since the earthquake. Her father, Gary, 51, from Wolverhampton, said: “We haven’t given up hope, we just want to hear from Hannah. It’s just unbelievable – she is due to come home in two weeks.

“She posted on her travel blog just a couple of days ago that she had survived her first quake out there – she said a 7.3 hit offshore a couple of days ago.

“They say when one hits there is often another to follow and that’s been the case here.”

In the port town of Ofunato, more than 300 houses were reported to have been destroyed, and a large section of Kesennuma, a town of 70,000 people in the Miyagi district, burned furiously into the night after fuel leaking from damaged cars caught fire and spread unchecked, with the emergency services unable to reach the area. “We were shaken so strongly for a while that we needed to hold on to something in order not to fall,” said a local government official in Kurihara in Miyagi.

“We couldn’t escape the building immediately because the tremors continued.”

In the coastal town of Aomori, at least five ocean-going ships were upended by the wave, coming to rest with the red hulls exposed as the waters drove inland, bursting sea defences and flooding harbourside streets. In Miyagi prefecture a schoolboy was swept away. Five people were reported to have been crushed to death by falling buildings in the Tokyo area.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ken Hoshi, a local government official in Ishinomaki, a port city in Miyagi prefecture.

“The water came as far as to the train station, hundreds of metres away from the coast.”

The 41-year-old official said his city had turned into a flood zone. “I’m worried because I can’t contact my family. But because it’s my duty, I’m braced to spend the night here.”

After years of being drilled in earthquake survival procedures, television pictures showed many residents reacting with remarkable composure and calm. Some office workers remained on the telephone as the buildings shook around them and sent files and books tumbling to the floor.

Others were less assured. “I dashed out of my office. I sort of panicked and left behind my mobile phone and belongings,” said Aya Nakamura, an office worker in Tokyo.”

“You see the crane on top of that tall building under construction? I thought it might fall off the building because all the buildings around me were shaking badly,” she added. Asagi Machida, a 27-year-old web designer, was walking near a coffee shop when the earthquake hit Tokyo. “The images from the New Zealand earthquake are still fresh in my mind so I was really scared,” she said, “I couldn’t believe such a big earthquake was happening here.”

As the 500mph tidal wave spread out across the Pacific, tsunami warnings were issued as far away as Chile, but early fears of low-lying islands being swamped appeared to prove unfounded.

Hundreds of people living in parts of California were told to evacuate their beachside homes as a precaution, with the tidal waves expected to take 24 hours to subside.

In Crescent City, in northern California, five people were swept to sea by 6ft waves with one man still missing, feared dead.

The Japanese government said the earthquake, which was felt 1,500 miles away in Beijing, had caused “tremendous damage” and left seven million homes without power.

In Tokyo, several people were injured when the roof of a hall collapsed during a graduation ceremony.

The Queen sent a message to Emperor Akihito, saying: “I was saddened to hear of the tragic loss of life caused by the earthquake which has struck north-east Japan today.”

David Cameron said the earthquake was a “terrible reminder of the destructive power of nature” and sent his sympathies to the people of Japan, while William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said Britain was ready to send humanitarian aid and search and rescue teams.

The last time a major earthquake hit Tokyo was in 1923, when the Great Kanto Earthquake claimed more than 140,000 lives, many of them in fires. In 1995 the Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,400 people.

The Foreign Office set up a helpline — 020 70080000 — for the families of British nationals living in Japan who are unable to contact loved ones.


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