A 5.5 magnitude earthquake hit eastern Japan on Saturday. Tremors were felt from inside Tokyo skyscrapers, and the city’s high-speed train service was halted as a precaution.
The earthquake struck at 8:44 p.m. local time (11:44 a.m. GMT) at
a depth of 63 kilometers (39 miles) in the Chiba prefecture which
neighbors Tokyo, the US Geological Survey reported.
The quake shook skyscrapers in the Japanese capital and
temporarily halted the city’s high-speed train service, according
to AFP. The trains soon resumed after a track inspection.
Local broadcaster NHK assured that neither Tokyo’s Narita
International Airport nor regional nuclear installations were
affected by the earthquake.
There were no reports of damage or casualties.
It comes just one week after another 5.5 earthquake struck close
to the capital, and three weeks after a major 7.3 magnitude quake
sent small tsunamis to Japan’s northeast coast and prompted an
evacuation at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
While earthquakes of different magnitudes are not uncommon in
Japan, the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster that
triggered the core meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima
plant has made every quake report in the region particularly
alarming.
As the world watches with apprehension at how Fukushima’s
decommissioning work unfolds, prominent Japanese-Canadian
scientist David Suzuki warned last week that another nearby earthquake of
magnitude 7 or higher could trigger a serious nuclear
catastrophe, decimating Japan and reaching the US west coast.
“If the fourth [reactor] goes under an earthquake and those rods
are exposed, then it’s bye, bye, Japan and everybody on the west
coast of North America should be evacuated. And if that isn’t
terrifying, I don’t know what is,” Suzuki said.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), Fukushima’s operator, is
set to begin the unprecedented and ambitious operation of
removing 400 tons of hazardous spent fuel from the devastated
plant. The work has already run into some obstacles, as some of the assemblies turned out to
have been damaged even before the March 2011 disaster, making
them unsuitable for the planned transportation.