Tokyo: The death toll in a powerful earthquake that rocked Japan’s Osaka on Monday has risen to five, with some 370 injured, officials said on Tuesday, urging vigilance against landslides ahead of heavy rains.
The fifth fatality was a 66-year-old man who was found dead on Tuesday under a number of books and CDs in his home, a local government spokeswoman said.
The other casualties were a nine-year-old girl who was killed when a wall collapsed at her school following the 5.3-magnitude quake, along with two men and a woman, all in their eighties, who were trapped under a wall or furniture.
“The government will keep up efforts to rescue people,” top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters, though he added that there were no reports of missing people.
And he said officials would do “everything we can” to quickly restore gas and running water to homes cut off after the quake. Japan’s meteorological agency meanwhile warned that heavy rains expected in Osaka on Tuesday and Wednesday could cause landslides in the region, with the quake potentially having loosened earth.
Suga also called for residents to be on alert, saying “landslide disasters are possible in the region that experienced strong tremors, even if rains are light.”
The weather agency said the region could see 50 millimetres of rain by Wednesday morning and up to 100 millimetres in the 24 hours after that to Thursday morning.
A 4.0-magnitude aftershock hit the region early on Tuesday, the meteorological agency said. — AFP
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