Heavy earthquake of about 6.9-magnitude strikes off Japan


A 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck off Japan's Honshu island on Tuesday, triggering tsunami waves and bringing back traumatic memories for locals of the devastating 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Residents in Fukushima Prefecture braced for the worst after a tsunami warning was issued early Tuesday morning -- along the same stretch of coast devastated by enormous waves five years ago.
In 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake -- one of the worst ever to hit Japan -- killed more than 20,000 people and caused tsunamis of up to 12 meters (40 feet) which swamped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering a nuclear meltdown.
Tuesday's quake struck close to the epicenter of the 2011 quake, just 37 kilometers (23 miles) east-southeast of Namie at a depth of 11.4 kilometers (7 miles).
The quake triggered a tsunami warning in Japan's Fukushima and Miyagi Prefectures, causing the government to urge thousands to seek higher ground amid warnings waves could be up to 3 meters high (10 feet).
Speaking to Japanese public broadcaster NHK, residents from the Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures said they had immediately feared the worst when they felt the earthquake strike.
"I felt a strong shaking, but it was weaker than the earthquake in 2011," a Fukushima prefecture man told NHK. "I thought something terrible might happen, so I tried to escape to higher ground right away."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cardi B explains why she 'drugged and robbed' men

Image
Cardi B has defended herself after a video resurfaced of her saying she drugged and robbed men who wanted to have sex with her while she worked as a stripper before finding fame. The rapper faced criticism after the three-year-old Instagram live video recirculated on social media. "Whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what I had to do to survive," she wrote on Tuesday. "I never claimed to be perfect or come from a perfect world." The original video was made as her career was starting to take off and was her response to someone who said she didn't deserve success because she hadn't put in any work. "Nothing was handed to me. Nothing," she said in the video, before going on to reveal that she would invite men to a hotel before drugging and robbing them. In response to the furore, she wrote on Instagram that she had been talking "about things in my past right or wrong that I felt I needed to do to make a living...
Read more

'Students among dead' in Jordan flash floods

Image
At least seven people have been killed and 16 more are missing after flash floods struck an area near the Dead Sea in Jordan, officials say. Most of those killed and missing were students on a trip, civil defence sources said, but this was not confirmed. Prime Minister Omar Razzaz is reported to be overseeing a rescue operation at the Zara Maeen hot springs area. Search teams have so far rescued 11 people, Reuters reported. Some of them are said to be in a serious condition.
Read more

Nigeria hunger crises can kill 200 children per day.

Image
  Two hundred children could die each day from hunger in northeastern Nigeria as a result of the ongoing conflict in the country, a humanitarian agency has warned. Up to half of all children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, international charity Save the Children said on Monday, after screening the health of boys and girls in the region between June and October in 2016. The figure could be even worse in areas that are out of reach because of insecurity, according to the report. Children are presenting in desperate conditions and facing severe malnutrition, often in combination with other life-threatening illnesses like pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoea," said Ben Foot, Save the Children country director. "For some cases this may be the second or third time they have fought malnutrition so their immune systems are already severely weakened." Violent attacks on civilians since 2009 by the armed group Boko H...
Read more