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The death toll from the major earthquake that hit Japan on Tuesday rose to 28 as the search for trapped survivors inside a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses in the country’s south-west continued.
The magnitude 6.8 earthquake that struck the Kumamoto prefecture on the island of Kyushu has injured at least 62, the prefectural government said. That number has steadily grown, fanning fears it will rise.
Almost 5,000 Self-Defence Forces (SDF) personnel deployed to the region will be challenged by temperatures rising to 35C on Thursday, officials said, and a significant magnitude 5.8 aftershock hit overnight to further complicate recovery efforts.
About 170 rescue workers are searching the Aeon mall shopping centre in the town of Kashima, which was bustling with thousands of people when the quake happened.
The company said about 3,000 customers were evacuated to a parking lot before a gas explosion happened in another part of the mall. Twelve people have been pulled from the rubble of the mall. Of them, six have died.
All those caught in the explosion were shop workers who went back into the building after the evacuation, Aeon said. Aeon’s president bowed in apology at a press conference on Wednesday, saying the company had failed to anticipate the explosion, the cause of which is still being investigated.
Japanese media footage from inside the the mall showed that part of the ceiling had caved in, and metal pieces and other debris were scattered about as helmeted and masked rescue workers searched the area.
Police and SDF personnel are still searching for four workers in the debris at the Nippon Paper mill in Yatsushiro, where a chimney collapsed. Seven others were trapped, with five of them confirmed dead and two badly injured.
In the first reported death of a foreign national, a Vietnamese technical intern was killed after a crane fell on him at a factory where he worked, according to the Vietnamese government.
Nearly 23,000 homes are without electricity and 75,000 homes have no running water, Kumamoto officials said. About 15,000 people have been evacuated to 400 shelters.
The defence minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, announced on Wednesday evening that the SDF was airlifting coolers to Kumamoto for deployment at shelters, while SDF vessels were shipping water and food supplies.
“We’re doing everything possible to make saving lives a priority, making efforts to deliver life-saving supplies, beginning with water,” said Koizumi.
Aerial police footage showed some homes completely flattened, including a few that crumbled into a nearby river.
Some locals said the quake was the biggest they had felt in their lifetimes, measuring at the top of Japan’s seven-level shindo scale.
“It was the strongest quake I ever experienced,” Kanzo Matsumoto, 73, the operator of a luxury onsen hot spring inn in Yatsushiro, told Agence France-Presse.
Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority said some ground surfaces were displaced by as much as 87 centimetres in the quake.
Yatsushiro town hall suffered damage to its base-isolation system – an earthquake-resistant technology designed to protect a building by cushioning its foundations from intense shaking. The town hall’s system was rebuilt after a deadly 2016 tremor.
Some auto and chip manufacturers with plants in Kyushu have halted production.
Toyota said it would pause operations at three plants in the region through Friday as it weighed the quake’s impact on suppliers and logistics. Honda, too, suspended operations at a motorcycle plant until Friday.
Taiwan’s TSMC has resumed operations at its Kumamoto facility, but Sony, Renesas and Tokyo Electron have all halted production.
Kyushu is a key base for Japan’s automotive and semiconductor industries, which account for roughly two-fifths of regional industrial output.
Analysts said the shutdowns appeared driven largely by precautions for workers, rather than by damage to production facilities.
Kumamoto was hit by two devastating earthquakes in 2016, which killed 273 people.
With Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse
