Minae Akiyama had traveled from southern Japan to Ishikawa prefecture to celebrate New Year’s with her family, when the ground began to shake. “Thinking about it now still makes me tremble. My heart was pounding, my mind went blank, we just scrambled,” she told from a shelter in the city of Nanao, where she and her family are now staying in the aftermath of the deadly 7.5 magnitude quake that struck on Monday.
Akiyama described sheltering under a table during the quake and praying for survival, before grabbing essentials and running outside. Photos from her mother’s house afterward show closets and cabinets tipped over, and food and kitchen tools scattered on the floor.
The family was unharmed – but two days later, the quake still feels fresh as they wait for relief at the shelter, enduring frequent aftershocks coursing through the ground. Even at the shelter, rubble can be seen surrounding some of the building’s cement pillars.“I feel like, even now, the building is shaking,” Akiyama said. “Whenever an aftershock happens, I think of the main quake and my body trembles.” Monday’s earthquake, on the first day of the new year, killed at least 84 people, with 79 still missing as of 3 p.m. Thursday (1 a.m. ET), according to a spokesperson for Ishikawa Prefecture.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi on Wednesday said 70 people had been rescued and officials were rushing to meet a request to deploy rescue dogs.The quake shook the Noto Peninsula, located on the western, more rural side of central Japan, triggering tsunami alerts, fires and collapsed buildings. Photos across the region showed entire multi-story buildings had fallen on their side, burned structures and rubble where houses once stood.Infrastructure damage remains a major challenge, Hayashi said Wednesday. Roads in and around the peninsula are blocked, though some routes are being cleared for vehicles to deliver food and essentials to the impacted areas, he said.
For some, the quake brought back memories of the 2011 Tōhoku 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, which triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant. It left more than 22,000 dead or missing, most of them from tsunami waves, with the long-term impact still felt to this day.While the extent of the damage from Monday’s quake is still being assessed, the death toll and levels of destruction appear to be far from that wrought by the 2011 disaster in a country long used to earthquakes and where building codes, even in more remote areas, are strictly adhered to.
Source: Here