6.8 earthquake in Japan

I didn’t want this story to get too buried in the bottom of the pile. I may want to come back to this story and talk about it more in depth since there were no reported deaths. For now, here are a few excerpts.

Thursday’s tremor follows a string of earthquakes in the same region, the first of which in mid-June killed at least 10 people and left as many again missing.
The damage was relatively minor in Thursday’s quake because its focus was more than 100 km (62 miles) underground, a seismologist said.

“It was deep,” said Naoshi Hirata, a professor of geophysics, at Tokyo University. “A shallow quake of magnitude 6.8 would cause a lot of damage, but a quake deep underground is the same as one that’s far away.”

“There were no reports of deaths or people buried alive,” top government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura told reporters. “But the prime minister has ordered us to continue checking.”

With few strong aftershocks to hamper operations, the clean-up started almost immediately. Most schools in the region were open as usual and phone and electricity services were restored, providers said.

Get the full story here at MSNBC and here at CNN.

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