Northern Japan quake kills 3, more missing

Source: Agencies  |   2008-6-14  |     ONLINE EDITION

AN EARTHQUAKE with a magnitude of 7.2 struck rural northern Japan today, killing at least three people, officials and televisions said. Several others were trapped in hot spring resort hit by a landslide.

The quake, at 8:43am (2343 GMT yesterday), was centred in Iwate, a sparsely populated area around 300 km (190 miles) north of Tokyo. Dozens of aftershocks also jolted the area.

"I was outside and I wanted to rush back to the store, but I couldn't move because it was shaking," a liquor store owner told Fuji TV. "Broken bottles are all over the store, and there's a smell of alcohol everywhere."

One of the people killed was caught in a landslide, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura told reporters. A second was killed as he ran out of a building and was run over by a car. NHK said another man was killed at a dam construction site hit by falling rocks.

At least four people were buried in a landslide at a hot spring resort in Kurihara city in hard-hit Miyagi prefecture, TV Asahi reported, though it was unknown whether they were dead.

Three more were missing at a work site after another landslide in Kurihara, Kyodo news agency said, adding that more than 100 people were hurt.

Water containing a small amount of radiation leaked within a Tokyo Electric Power Co nuclear power facility in the region, but there was no leakage outside, a spokesman for Japan's biggest utility said.

Rail operator JR East said 2,000 were trapped on bullet trains that stopped between stations.

The energy released by the quake was far less than in the case of the magnitude 7.9 earthquake that hit southwestern China on May 12, leaving nearly 87,000 people dead or missing.

"The seismic energy of the China quake was one order of magnitude greater," Naoshi Hirata, a professor at Tokyo University's Earthquake Research Institute, told Reuters.