Homes collapse, 39 injured in Japan's magnitude-6.8 earthquake

A strong earthquake in the mountainous area of central Japan that hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics destroyed more than half a dozen homes in a ski resort town and injured at least 30 people, officials said.

The magnitude-6.8 earthquake struck Saturday near Nagano city shortly after 10pm (1300 GMT) at a depth of 10 kilometres, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The US Geological Survey measured the quake’s magnitude at 6.2. Since the quake occurred inland, there was no possibility of a tsunami.

Ryo Nishino, a restaurant owner in Hakuba, a ski town west of Nagano, told Japanese broadcaster NHK that he had “never experienced a quake that shook so hard. The sideways shaking was enormous.” He said he was in the restaurant’s wine cellar when the quake struck, and that nothing broke there.

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said no abnormalities were reported at three nuclear power plants in the affected areas. All of Japan’s nuclear plants are offline following a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami in 2011 that sent three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant into meltdown. Fukushima is about 250 kilometres northeast of where Saturday’s earthquake occurred.

Thirty people were injured, at least two seriously, the Federal Disaster Management Agency said Sunday.

“We are trying to assess the situation as quickly as possible, and we’ll do our utmost for the rescue of the injured people,” Japan’s top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, told reporters.