Earthquake in Japan: 84 dead, 179 missing and little hope of finding survivors

Rescue teams today were in a race against time to find what are probably the last survivors of the earthquake that shook central Japan on Monday and left at least 84 dead and 179 missing.

Ishikawa Prefecture, on the western fringe of the center of the island of honshu (the main one in the country), was where the earthquake occurred and today it concentrates the main damage and all the dead and missing reported by local authorities.

Locations like Wajima (27,000 inhabitants) or Suzu (14,000) were the main focus of the military and rescue teams today, since today 72 hours have passed (the period after which it is considered very difficult to find survivors buried under the rubble) since the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that occurred its epicenter a few kilometers from both cities.

Late in the afternoon, the fire service published a video with the rescue of a woman in her 80s from a collapsed house in the coastal city of Wajima, the most affected, after 72 hours after the earthquake that occurred on Monday. at 16:10 local time (7:10 GMT).

The Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, today asked “maximum effort” to try to find people alive in this region.

Wajima alone there are 48 deaths and 93 missing, while 23 lost their lives in Suzu and 68 of their neighbors remain missing.

Roads destroyed and hundreds of people cut off

Access problems are the other big problem for rescuers and the population, since in these two municipalities alone there are 750 people still incommunicado because the earthquake, which raised the ground causing differences in level of four meters, has destroyed countless roads and paths.

A military ship has managed to disembark heavy machinery in Wajima so that these roads can begin to be repaired, according to the Kyodo agency.

Experts have also warned of aftershocks throughout this week and the next that could be of great intensity, in addition to warning that the rains that are hitting the area could cause landslides and make rescue tasks even more difficult.

To date, the number of injured in Ishikawa exceeds 300, including serious and minor injuries, while in the entire prefecture, where it is estimated that more than 200 buildings collapsed, some 34,000 people remain in evacuation centers.

The fact that the earthquake occurred on January 1, when many people had traveled to the region to celebrate the New Year with their families, has meant that there are more people evacuated than normally estimated by local authorities and reports of The NHK network speaks of shortages of food, water or warm clothing in some shelters.

Planes, ships and 2,000 soldiers

As of this Thursday, some 2,000 members of the Self-Defense Forces (Army) have been deployed in the region, in addition to 22 aircraft and eight ships for rescue activities and damage information collection, double the resources that were deployed in a beginning

The Japanese government has said it will use about 4 billion yen (about US$28 million) of emergency funds to increase aid in Ishikawa, including doubling the current deployment of members of the Self-Defense Forces to 4,600. effective.

The earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula – an area known to have active faults – on Monday and had its epicenter 30 kilometers northeast of Wajima, reaching level 7 on the Japanese closed scale of 7, which focuses in the destructive power of the tremor.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) considers that in a rank 7 earthquake it is impossible to stand and that it is only possible to move by crawling on the ground.

This earthquake, the most devastating in Japan since the 2016 earthquake in Kumamoto prefecture (which left more than 200 dead), is the first level 7 to be recorded in the country since 2018, when an earthquake reached that level in a very sparsely populated island of Hokkaido.

Monday’s tremor forced a tsunami warning of the highest category to be activated for hours (those that are implemented when waves of more than three meters are expected), the first time this has happened in the country since the 9-degree Richter earthquake that hit hit the northeast of the country in 2011.

That earthquake triggered a tsunami that left more than 20,000 dead and caused the partial meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986.