KUMAMOTO/JAPAN
Japanese emergency workers searched tirelessly for survivors at a wrecked shopping mall on Thursday, as the death toll from a major earthquake hit 34 and tens of thousands were left without power in punishing heat.
The Kumamoto disaster management office issued the new tally for Tuesday’s quake, with seven bodies now extracted from the mass of rubble, steel and wires of the Aeon shopping mall after a suspected gas blast. Eight people were also confirmed dead at the Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro city, where part of a red-and-white smokestack collapsed, according to the office.
Five others were in a critical condition after the 7.1-magnitude tremor, while almost 9,500 locals were in evacuation centers in the region of southwestern Japan on the island of Kyushu. The quake caused widespread damage, flattening homes, damaging bridges, triggering fires and leaving tens of thousands of residents without power and water in temperatures forecast to hit 38C this weekend.
Some 13,520 households remained without electricity on Thursday. Hundreds of elderly people — Japan has the world’s second-oldest population — slumbered on thin mats on the hard lobby floor at one community center in Uki city as they sought relief from the searing sun.
“Thank God for these shelters,” said one woman, who declined to give her name, as people slept between chairs and tables or gathered around a television. “In this heat, if you don’t have electricity and air conditioning, it’s very tough,” father-of-four supermarket employee Hiroyuki Matsushima, 53, told media.
With no power and running water, Retiree Kenji Ota, 72, has been sleeping inside his car at night. “This quake was so strong. It was horrible … I can only sleep for two hours or so at night,” he said. The town of Hikawa was one of the areas worst hit, where many older structures crumpled in the quake and where residents still had no water or power on Thursday.
“The biggest problem is that there is no toilet… I had to go to a nearby school,” said Kinuko Uemura, 85, who told media she and her husband were lucky to survive the collapse of their traditional house. Soshiro Okawa, 59, was at the back of his roadside souvenir shop when the quake struck. “It was my first time experiencing an earthquake that literally made the ground rise,” he said.
