The estimate of the number of missing people from the powerful earthquake that struck central Japan on January 1 tripled as of Monday afternoon, surpassing the threshold of 300. A preliminary count puts 168 people dead in the region.
• Also read: Earthquake in Japan: Weather makes search difficult
• Also read: 90-year-old Japanese woman was rescued alive from the rubble five days after the earthquake
A week after the magnitude 7.5 earthquake that also injured 565 people, 323 people are now missing, according to a new report from local authorities as of Monday afternoon.
Most of the people unheard of by their relatives were reported in the town of Wajima, one of the worst-hit towns on the Noto Peninsula on the Sea of Japan. The city was particularly the scene of serious fires.
The earthquake, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, caused thousands of landslides and the collapse of buildings and roads across the region.
It also triggered a tsunami with waves more than a meter high on the coast of the Noto Peninsula, a narrow strip of land about a hundred kilometers long.
The quake was felt as far as Tokyo, 300 kilometers away.
“Prevent new deaths at all costs.”
The thousands of rescuers from across Japan who continue to sift through the rubble in search of bodies are having to contend with snow that fell across the region on Monday, depositing in layers of more than 10 cm in places, as well as temperatures that do not above 4 °C were °C.
“For all those waiting for help under the rubble and for their families: please do not give up your efforts,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged at a meeting on Monday, citing television channel FNN.
New landslides are feared due to rainfall and ice conditions are expected to further complicate traffic on roads damaged by the earthquake, authorities warned.
In addition, emergency services are continuing their efforts to reach and deliver food and equipment to more than 2,000 people, some of whom are in critical situations and isolated due to roads damaged by the earthquake.
Hiroshi Hase, the governor of Ishikawa department, where Noto is located, stressed to public broadcaster NHK that it was “necessary at all costs to prevent deaths” among those fleeing the disaster, while some 29,000 people were in the area on Sunday the government of 404 were housed in shelters.
“It is a challenge to provide people with a minimum of humanitarian assistance so that they can survive,” Hisayoshi Kondo, head of a medical aid team sent to the site, told Asahi TV, estimating that “in remote areas, supplies are inadequate. “The supply of water and food is still not enough.
Critical health situation
But due to difficult access to residents' shelters, even “sending aid from all over the country cannot solve the problem,” said the doctor.
According to the mayor of Wajima city, the health situation in the emergency shelters is critical.
“Evacuation centers are overcrowded and infectious diseases such as norovirus and Covid are emerging,” Shigeru Sakaguchi warned on Sunday during a meeting on aid to disaster victims, according to the Asahi daily.
The Ishikawa governor said authorities were preparing additional shelters with enough water, food and heaters and were also seizing hotel rooms.
Around 17,000 households were still without power on Sunday, and 70,000 households had no access to running water.
This earthquake is the first to kill more than 100 people in Japan since the devastating Kumamoto (southwest) earthquake that killed 276 people in 2016.
Japan is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is one of the countries with the most frequent earthquakes.
The archipelago is haunted by the memory of the terrible 9.0 magnitude earthquake that was followed by a huge tsunami on its northeastern shores in March 2011, a disaster that left some 20,000 people dead and missing.
This disaster also led to the Fukushima nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986.