by Kyoko Hasegawa August 11, 2009
MISHIMA, Japan (AFP) - A strong earthquake rocked central Japan on Tuesday injuring at least 64 people, triggering a landslide and shutting down a nuclear power plant and bullet trains, officials said.
The magnitude 6.4 tremor shook buildings, threw objects from shelves and jolted people from their sleep in and around Tokyo, the world's largest urban area, at 5:07 am (2007 GMT Monday).
The quake hit in the Pacific Ocean, about 170 kilometres (105 miles) southwest of Tokyo, at a depth of 27 kilometres, according to the US Geological Survey.
Three of the injured were in a serious condition, said officials in the coastal prefectures of Shizuoka, Kanagawa and Aichi, located south and west of Tokyo. Most of the 64 hurt were hit by falling objects.
"It was a huge tremble, like nothing I had experienced before," said Tadao Negami, a 69-year-old resident of Mishima city in Shizuoka.
"I couldn't stay seated on a chair. My daughter and my grandchildren were scared and surprised and they rushed downstairs."
A large landslide triggered by the quake damaged a highway at Makinohara, Shizuoka, causing long traffic jams, television footage showed.
A fire broke out at a machinery plant but was put under control, a government official said.
The Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka immediately shut down two reactors after the quake, operator Chubu Electric Power Co. said. But a company official said no abnormal events were registered at the plant.
The utility said the quake caused power failures in some 9,500 households.
Central Japan Railway Co. suspended Shinkansen bullet trains in the quake-hit region but resumed the services several hours later.
Prime Minister Taro Aso's office set up an emergency centre shortly after the quake, which was followed by 13 noticeable aftershocks.
Japan's Meteorological Agency, which measured the quake at a revised 6.5, said there was no risk of a tsunami after initial waves raised the ocean surface by about 40 centimetres (16 inches) at Omaezaki, Shizuoka.
The agency was also monitoring Typhoon Etau, which threatened to bring strong rains to coastal areas near Tokyo later in the day, although the typhoon was veering east, away from the Japanese coast.
Torrential rains triggered by Etau have soaked much of Japan since the weekend, and floods and landslides triggered by the downpours had killed 13 people by Monday and left 18 missing.
The weather agency issued an alert over more "possible landslides and sediment disasters" in the quake-hit areas, warning that the water-soaked earth may be unstable after being jolted by the strong tremor.
An earthquake also hit central Japan on Sunday. Around 20 percent of the world's most powerful earthquakes strike the country.
Tokyo has long braced itself for a great quake -- over a magnitude of 8.0 -- while major quakes are also expected to strike some time in future in the Tokai and Nankai regions.
In 1923, a quake that measured 8.3 on the Richter scale hit the Tokyo region, killing more than 140,000 people, many of them in fires that swept across the city.
