Oct. 24, 2004
By Hiroyuki Muramoto
Reuters
OJIYA, Japan (Reuters) - Japan resumed rescue efforts at first light on Monday as aftershocks rattled the area where the country's deadliest earthquake in nine years killed at least 23 people and injured more than 2,000 at the weekend.
A powerful quake with a magnitude of 5.6 struck rural Niigata prefecture, about 150 miles north of Tokyo, at 6:05 a.m. on Monday (5:05 p.m. EDT Sunday) and was also felt in the capital.
At least one building in Niigata collapsed and television showed people screaming, but there were no reports of further injuries in the latest quake, one of hundreds of aftershocks.
Military helicopters were ferrying people out of the village of Yamakoshi and nearby city of Nagaoka, where hundreds of residents had been stranded by landslides since the first quake on Saturday, which had a magnitude of 6.8.
Other helicopters were carrying food and supplies to areas that had been cut off, public broadcaster NHK said.
"The shocks are continuing and my children are scared," one woman in the town of Kawaguchi told NHK. "I want to get back to our warm house."
A small boy said: "I'm scared. I'm cold."
Television pictures showed a group of villagers resting on improvised beds of straw and plastic sheeting in the road or warming themselves by open fires.
More than 80,000 people across the region had spent a second night in shelters or in the open air. Some had slept in their cars. Temperatures fell below 10 Celsius (50 F) in the area overnight.
Television showed hundreds of people crammed together under covers and coats in one shelter. Many complained that they had little or no food as it took time for supplies to reach the mountainous area, public broadcaster NHK said.
DEADLIEST SINCE KOBE
Saturday's quake, coming days after a typhoon killed at least 80 people, was the deadliest in Japan since the Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,400 in 1995.
More than 2,000 houses were damaged in the quake. Some residents ventured back to their homes to inspect damage, but officials warned them to stay away from collapsed buildings because of the danger of aftershocks.
Tohoku Electric Power was struggling to restore electricity to the area, where 62,000 households still lacked power on Monday. Thousands of homes were also without water and people were lining up with buckets at distribution centers.
There were no reports of significant damage to industry in the region, which includes chemical and textile manufacturing as well as electronics and food processing.
Some factories had halted production, however, and damage to roads and railways raised concerns about distribution bottlenecks, media said.
Companies with operations in the area include Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., maker of Panasonic products, as well as consumer electronics group Sharp Corp. and Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd.
The quakes' magnitude was measured according to a technique similar to the Richter scale but adjusted for Japan's geological characteristics.
Japan is one of the world's most seismically active areas, accounting for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude six or greater.
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