Two Killed, 148 Injured in Powerful Quake in Western Japan

Two people were killed and at least 148 injured, 14 of them seriously, in a powerful earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale which jolted a wide area of western Japan on Saturday afternoon, the Japanese government announced.

A 50-year-old housewife was killed by a falling chunk of concrete on the balcony of an apartment in the city of Hojo in Ehime Prefecture while an 80-year-old woman died when a concrete fence collapsed in Kure of Hiroshima Prefecture, police said.

The quake, which occurred at around 3:28 p.m. local time (06:28 GMT), was felt in Kochi, Osaki and Kumano in Hiroshima Prefecture and many parts of Ehime and Yamaguchi prefectures.

The temblor caused damage to 558 homes, as of 10 p.m. It also caused extensive power outages, disrupted train services and forced highway authorities to temporarily close some roads in the affected areas.

Bullet train operations on the Sanyo Shinkansen Line were suspended between Okayama Station, Okayama Prefecture nearby Hiroshima, and Kokura Station in Fukuoka Prefecture, southwestern Japan, West Japan Railway Co. said.

Highway services are also reported to have been suspended for safety reasons in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Tottori and Okayama prefectures.

The tremor did not affect the operations of two nuclear plants in the area, one in Ehime Prefecture and the other in Shimane Prefecture, according to the plants' operators.

In Tokyo, the Japanese central government set up an ad hoc office at the prime minister's official residence to deal with the damage and reconstruction in affected areas, government officials said.

The epicenter of the quake is estimated to be about 51 kilometers below the seabed at a point in Hiroshima Bay in the Seto Inland Sea.

A powerful earthquake occurs roughly every 50 years in the area. Eleven people were killed in a 1905 quake in Hiroshima Prefecture, and two people were killed in an earthquake in 1949 in Kure.

Japan is one of the world's most earth-quake-prone regions, sitting atop the juncture of at least three tectonic plates, or pieces of the earth's crust.






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