51 people still missing after earthquake in Japan
AFP journalists reported massive devastation from the coastal town of Anamizu on Noto: cars could be seen crushed under collapsed concrete and the facades of multi-storey buildings were torn off.
Soldiers, firefighters and police officers who had come to the disaster area from all over Japan continued to search for signs of life of buried people.
Around 29,000 households in Ishikawa were still without power. In the prefecture and two neighboring regions, 110,000 households had no access to running water.
Head of government Fumio Kishida spoke of a "very difficult situation" at a cabinet meeting on Thursday. He called on the emergency services to continue to make "every effort" to save lives.
The main Japanese island of Honshu was shaken by a severe 7.5-magnitude quake and dozens of aftershocks on New Year's Day and hit by tsunami waves.
Hundreds of houses on the Noto peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture collapsed or were damaged as a result of the earth tremors. Satellite images showed massive damage, particularly in the coastal towns of Wajima and Suzu. Roads became impassable and a major fire destroyed a historic market district in Suzu. According to the television station NHK, a person was swept away by a tsunami wave near Suzu.
Japan is located on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates collide. The country is shaken by hundreds of earthquakes every year, most of which cause hardly any damage. A massive undersea quake of magnitude 9.0 triggered a devastating tsunami wave in March 2011, killing around 18,500 people. The tsunami flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant and led to the worst nuclear accident since the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.
After Monday's quake, the Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority reported no unusual incidents at the Shika nuclear power plant in the affected Ishikawa prefecture or other nuclear facilities in the country.
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Source: www.stern.de
