Japan's 7.1 quake brought down a shopping mall in Kumamoto, and the aftershocks keep coming
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto in southern Japan on 28 July, killing one person, injuring dozens, collapsing homes and triggering a short-lived tsunami advisory.
It was nearly four in the afternoon in Japan when the ground under Kumamoto started moving in earnest. A magnitude 7.1 earthquake, with its epicentre just ten kilometres down, shook the prefecture in the country’s southwest and left a toll the authorities are still counting: at least one person died when a house came down on them, around fifty were hurt, and people were trapped in the rubble of a shopping mall in Kumamoto city.
Ten kilometres is shallow. In an earthquake that almost trivial-sounding depth is the difference between a scare and real damage — the energy reaches the surface all but intact, and that is exactly what people felt.
Where did Japan’s earthquake hit?
Kumamoto Prefecture, on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. The quake struck late on Tuesday afternoon local time and put seven prefectures under emergency alerts. More than a dozen houses collapsed, tens of thousands of homes lost power and several roads were damaged — enough to slow rescue teams reaching the more rural pockets.
Was there a tsunami warning?
There was, and it was lifted soon after. Japan’s meteorological agency issued the advisory within minutes, forecasting waves of up to a metre along the coast, then cancelled it once it confirmed the epicentre was on land rather than offshore. Anyone who wants to follow the alerts as they happen can do so on the Japan Meteorological Agency’s live hazard map, updated by the minute.
What about the aftershocks?
More than sixty in the hours that followed, ranging from magnitude 1 to 4. That is the normal script after a quake this size, and it is also what keeps people out of their homes: nobody sleeps easily in a building that has already taken a 7.1 and is still being rattled. Officials asked residents not to re-enter any structure with visible cracking.
Kumamoto knows this script well. In 2016 the same prefecture took a sequence of quakes that badly damaged its castle, one of Japan’s most visited landmarks, and the repairs dragged on for years. It has been a punishing summer for natural disasters just about everywhere — Europe spent days watching the Ávila wildfires pull Portuguese crews across the border — and Japan has just added its own.
Image: 663highland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)
