Japanese rescuers with bulldozers and sniffer dogs scrabbled through the mud on Friday to find survivors from a landslide that buried houses after a powerful quake, as the death toll rose to 16.

About 26 people were still unaccounted for in the small northern countryside town of Atsuma, where a cluster of dwellings were wrecked when a hillside collapsed with the force of the 6.7-magnitude quake, causing deep brown scars in the landscape.

Hongkongers stranded in Japan try to find way home after deadly quake

“We’ve heard there are people still stuck under the mud, so we’ve been working around the clock but it’s been difficult to rescue them,” a Self-Defence Forces serviceman in Atsuma told public broadcaster NHK.

“We will take measures to find them quickly,” he added.

One village resident said: “It was horrendous. The land slid all the way down and I thought I would die. I thought my house would collapse.”

Around 1.6 million households in the sparsely populated northern island of Hokkaido were still without power after the quake damaged a thermal plant supplying electricity to the region.

According to Hokkaido Electric, power has been restored to 1.4 million houses – about 40 per cent of the population – but authorities have warned it could take as long as a week to get the service fully back to normal.

Some 22,000 rescuers including troops called up from the Self-Defence Forces handed out emergency water supplies and long queues formed at service stations and supermarkets, as people stocked up fearing further quakes.

“So far there are 16 [dead] people and many people injured, with 26 still missing,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a cabinet meeting to discuss the quake.

“Please give your sympathy to people who spent a dark night in fear, and do everything you can to restore electricity as soon as possible,” he instructed his ministers.

The earthquake, which scored the maximum on a Japanese scale measuring the power of a quake’s shaking, also collapsed a handful of houses and walls in the main city of Sapporo.

However, considering the strength of the quake, the death toll was relatively light, with most victims coming from the landslide in Atsuma.

Transport services were gradually coming back on line with bullet trains expected to resume operations later Friday morning and the main airport in Sapporo beginning to process passengers after cancelling all flights the day before.

However, manufacturers were still being affected by power outages.

Toyota Motor Corp’s Tomakomai factory, which makes transmissions and other parts, said operations remained suspended indefinitely until power was restored, a spokesman said.

Toppan Printing’s operations at a plant in Chitose, which makes food packages, would remain suspended until it regained power, a spokesman said.

A football friendly between Japan and Chile in Sapporo planned on Friday was scrapped due to the transport and power chaos in Hokkaido.

The quake was the latest in a string of natural disasters to batter the country.

Western parts of the country are still recovering from the most powerful typhoon to strike Japan in a quarter of a century, which claimed 11 lives and shut down the main regional airport.

And officials warned of the danger of fresh quakes.

“Large quakes often occur, especially within two to three days” of a big one, said Toshiyuki Matsumori, in charge of monitoring earthquakes and tsunami at the meteorological agency.

The risk of housing collapses and landslides had increased, he said, urging residents “to pay full attention to seismic activity and rainfall and not to go into dangerous areas”.

Japan sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” where many of the world’s earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are recorded.

In June, a deadly tremor rocked the Osaka region, killing five people and injuring more than 350.

On March 11, 2011, a devastating 9.0-magnitude quake struck under the Pacific Ocean, and the resulting tsunami caused widespread damage and claimed thousands of lives.</s>Searchers are digging through mud and debris to look for survivors beneath the landslides caused by a powerful earthquake in northern Japan that left at least 16 people dead or presumed dead.

The magnitude 6.7 quake early on Thursday unleashed scores of landslides that buried homes in avalanches of soil, rock and timber on the country’s northern-most main island of Hokkaido.

In Atsuma, a town of 4,600 people, 26 were still unaccounted for.

The landslides ripped through some homes and buried others. Some residents interviewed by national broadcaster NHK described awakening to find their relatives and next-door neighbours gone.

“The entire thing just collapsed,” said one. “It’s unbelievable.”

The site of a landslide triggered by Thursday’s earthquake in Atsuma town, Hokkaido (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said nearly half of the nearly three million households on the island had their power restored after a day of island-wide blackouts.

“The forecasts are for rain, and that could bring more landslides, so please continue to exercise extreme caution,” he said.

The regional government said the bullet train to the provincial capital, Sapporo, was due to reopen later in the day.

The city’s regional airport also was beginning to resume operations after hundreds of flights had been cancelled, stranding thousands of travellers, due to Thursday’s power outage and light quake damage.

Hokkaido is Japan’s northern frontier and a major farming region with rugged mountain ranges and vast forests, and its people are accustomed to coping with long winters, isolation and other hardships.

It is sparsely populated compared to the rest of Japan, but disruptions were widespread. Many roads were closed and some were impassable.

In Sapporo, the regional capital and home to 1.9 million people, casualties were relatively light.

But damage to some parts of the city was severe, with houses atilt and roads crumbled or sunken.

A powerful earthquake hit wide areas on Japan’s northern-most main island of Hokkaido early ON Thursday (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

A mudslide left several cars half buried, and the ground subsided, leaving drainpipes and manhole covers protruding by more than a metre in some places.

“This is shocking. I was always walking on this street and I had never imagined this road could collapse in such a way,” said resident Sumi Noriyuki.

“But, if you think positively, imagine if I was walking here when this took place. I might have lost my life. So, I try to think I am lucky in this unfortunate situation.”

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Hiroshige Seko told reporters on Friday that it would take at least a week to fully restore power to all communities due to damage at a thermal power plant at Tomato-Atsuma that supplies half of Hokkaido’s electricity.

“We’re trying to do it faster, but it will likely take a week,” Seko said. He urged residents to conserve power by keeping lights off, unplugging unused appliances and having family members stay together in one room.

“This will help us to restore power to more places,” he said.

The last few months have brought a string of calamities in Japan.

The quake came on the heels of a typhoon that lifted heavy trucks off their wheels and triggered major flooding in western Japan, and damaged the main airport near Osaka and Kobe.

The summer also brought devastating floods and landslides from torrential rains in Hiroshima and deadly hot temperatures across the country.</s>TOKYO — Japanese authorities say 37 people have been confirmed dead from a powerful earthquake that struck the northern island of Hokkaido last week.

The Hokkaido government said Sunday that two people remain missing and one other person has no vital signs. Rescue workers are using backhoes and shovels to search for the missing in a tangle of dirt and the rubble of homes left by multiple landslides in the town of Atsuma. All but four of the victims are from the community of 4,600 people.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited a hard-hit area of Sapporo, the main city in Hokkaido.

The magnitude 6.7 earthquake before daybreak Thursday knocked out power and train service across Hokkaido. It took two days to restore electricity to most of the island of 5.4 million people.</s>TOKYO, Sept 7 (Reuters) - After an earthquake knocked out power to 5.3 million people this week, Hokkaido Electric expects to restore service to most of them by the end of Friday, but experts say the island-wide outage highlights fundamental flaws in Japan's power grid.

The blackout that hit Japan's northern island of Hokkaido after early Thursday's quake was the nation's worst in seven years, but it would have been less extensive if the utility was not so reliant on one large power station, had spread its plants more widely, and could transfer power more easily from other areas, specialists and energy executives said.

In the aftermath of Japan's March 2011 disaster, when an earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear meltdowns and widespread power outages, the government mandated a boost in renewable energy supplies, opened up a roughly $70 billion retail electricity market to competition and created a grid oversight company to address these issues.

But Hokkaido and other Japanese utilities have been slow to beef up networks and make them more resilient in a country that regularly experiences natural disasters, the specialists said.

"The crisis is primarily the result of over-reliance on a large coal plant in a centralized generation paradigm," said Andrew DeWit, a professor of energy policy at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

"That is odd and dangerous, considering the multiplicity of hazards Japan confronts and has experienced in recent years."

While not as many people were affected by this week's outage as after the March 2011 quake and tsunami, it was the first time a regional utility in Japan lost its full network, according to the country's Federation of Electric Power Companies.

Hokkaido Electric Power had restored power to a little more than half of the island's 2.95 million households by Friday afternoon after receiving supplies from nearby Honshu and rebooting some of its generating units.

The utility's Tomato-Atsuma coal station, which normally supplies about half the island's electricity, remained shut after sustaining damage in the quake. It may take a week to restore power fully to Hokkaido.

Hokkaido Electric aims to have power restored to about 80 percent of the island's households by the end of Friday, according to Japan industry minister Hiroshige Seko.

The abrupt halt in supplies from Tomato-Atsuma, which has three coal-fired generators, caused such a huge imbalance in supply and demand that other power plants on Hokkaido were tripped and shut down.

"Adjusting supply and demand is very difficult. Hokkaido's power grid is small and the share of Tomato-Atsuma is large, so it must have been much a more difficult a situation than after the big earthquake that struck eastern Japan," said Tsutomu Oyama, professor of electrical engineering at Yokohama National University.

With its only nuclear plant shut pending approval to restart under new safety guidelines imposed since the Fukushima meltdowns of 2011, Hokkaido Electric has been investing in a new gas-fired station and expanding the capacity of its connection to Honshu. Cost cuts have slowed the process.

It plans to start operations of the gas-fired unit next month and complete a 50 percent expansion in capacity on the Hokkaido-Honshu connection by March next year, a Hokkaido Electric spokesman told Reuters. Those transmission lines currently can supply only about 600 megawatts of power.

Asked if there were lessons from 2011 that could have been applied to help mitigate the current situation, the spokesman said the utility had conducted drills for scenarios including the shutdown of all three units at Tomato-Atsuma but did not provide details.

"It is difficult to answer this question because the 2011 quake and yesterday's quake are different situations," he said.</s>TOKYO (Reuters) - Power had been restored to almost all customers in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido by early Saturday, two days after an earthquake caused an island-wide blackout and killed at least 21 people.

But the impact of Thursday’s 6.7 magnitude quake was set to rumble on with Toyota Motor planning to halt operations at 16 of 18 domestic full-assembly plants due to a parts factory shutdown.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the confirmed death toll was 21, with six people in cardiopulmonary arrest - a term used in Japan to describe a victim’s condition before death is officially confirmed - and 13 people were missing.

The earthquake triggered landslides that buried houses and paralysed Hokkaido with widespread power and transport cuts, the latest natural disaster to hit Japan after typhoons, floods and deadly heat waves in the past two months.

Toyota Motor said it would suspend work at the 16 plants on Monday due to the shutdown of its transmission factory in Tomakomai in Hokkaido following the quake.

The company said it would decide later on whether to extend the shutdowns beyond Monday.

Suga called on businesses and Hokkaido’s 5.3 million residents to save power by about 10 percent from Monday, when usage rises, and said the government would likely resort to rolling blackouts if demand threatened to exceed supply capacity.

That would be the first use of rolling blackouts in Japan to deal with power shortages since March 2011, when a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Hokkaido Electric said power supplies had been restored island-wide to 2.93 million customers by early Saturday, leaving only 20,000 customers without electricity.

The utility will have supplies of up to 3.6 GW available by the end of Saturday, the trade ministry said, which is still short of pre-quake peak demand of 3.8 GW.

Japanese refiner Idemitsu Kosan Co is preparing to resume lorry product shipments at its 150,000 barrels-per-day Hokkaido refinery, a company official said.

Refining operations have been halted since Thursday.</s>TOKYO (AP) — The death toll has hit 39 from a powerful earthquake that struck the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido last week, authorities said Sunday. One person remained missing in the hard-hit town of Atsuma, where multiple landslides triggered by the quake slammed into houses at the foot of steep hills.

Rescue workers used backhoes and shovels to search for the missing in a tangle of dirt, fallen trees and the rubble of homes left by the landslides. All but four of the victims were from Atsuma, a community of 4,600 people.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited hard-hit Kiyota ward on the eastern edge of Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido. In some parts of Kiyota, the earth liquefied and sank as much as a meter (3 feet), tilting houses, cracking roads and unleashing a mudflow that solidified and trapped vehicles in parking lots.

The magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck before daybreak Thursday and knocked out power and train service across Hokkaido, home to 5.4 million people. It took two days to restore electricity to most households. A few hundred were still without power Sunday, mostly in Atsuma.

About 2,600 people were staying in temporary shelters, down from a peak of 16,600, the Hokkaido government said.</s>Searchers are digging through mud and debris to look for survivors beneath the landslides caused by a powerful earthquake in northern Japan that left at least 16 people dead or presumed dead.

The magnitude 6.7 quake early on Thursday unleashed scores of landslides that buried homes in avalanches of soil, rock and timber on the country's northern-most main island of Hokkaido.

In Atsuma, a town of 4,600 people, 26 were still unaccounted for.

The landslides ripped through some homes and buried others. Some residents interviewed by national broadcaster NHK described awakening to find their relatives and next-door neighbours gone.

"The entire thing just collapsed," said one. "It's unbelievable."

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said nearly half of the nearly three million households on the island had their power restored after a day of island-wide blackouts.

"The forecasts are for rain, and that could bring more landslides, so please continue to exercise extreme caution," he said.

The regional government said the bullet train to the provincial capital, Sapporo, was due to reopen later in the day.

The city's regional airport also was beginning to resume operations after hundreds of flights had been cancelled, stranding thousands of travellers, due to Thursday's power outage and light quake damage.

Hokkaido is Japan's northern frontier and a major farming region with rugged mountain ranges and vast forests, and its people are accustomed to coping with long winters, isolation and other hardships.

It is sparsely populated compared to the rest of Japan, but disruptions were widespread. Many roads were closed and some were impassable.

In Sapporo, the regional capital and home to 1.9 million people, casualties were relatively light.

But damage to some parts of the city was severe, with houses atilt and roads crumbled or sunken.

A mudslide left several cars half buried, and the ground subsided, leaving drainpipes and manhole covers protruding by more than a metre in some places.

"This is shocking. I was always walking on this street and I had never imagined this road could collapse in such a way," said resident Sumi Noriyuki.

"But, if you think positively, imagine if I was walking here when this took place. I might have lost my life. So, I try to think I am lucky in this unfortunate situation."

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Hiroshige Seko told reporters on Friday that it would take at least a week to fully restore power to all communities due to damage at a thermal power plant at Tomato-Atsuma that supplies half of Hokkaido's electricity.

"We're trying to do it faster, but it will likely take a week," Seko said. He urged residents to conserve power by keeping lights off, unplugging unused appliances and having family members stay together in one room.

"This will help us to restore power to more places," he said.

The last few months have brought a string of calamities in Japan.

The quake came on the heels of a typhoon that lifted heavy trucks off their wheels and triggered major flooding in western Japan, and damaged the main airport near Osaka and Kobe.

The summer also brought devastating floods and landslides from torrential rains in Hiroshima and deadly hot temperatures across the country.</s>The death toll from the 6.7-magnitude earthquake that shook Japan's northern Hokkaido island on Thursday rose to 16, the Japanese prime minister confirmed on Friday, while over 40 percent of the power supply on the island is now restored.

"So far there are 16 (dead) people and many people injured, with 26 still missing," prime minister Shinzo Abe said at a press briefing after an emergency cabinet meeting on Friday.

Abe added that rescue efforts were underway in the affected areas and urged the population to exercise extreme caution in the coming hours, as rains are expected to cause more landslides.

Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Hiroshige Seko added during the press conference that 47 percent of Hokkaido's power supply was restored.

At 06.00 local time (21.00 GMT on Thursday), electricity had returned to 1.4 million households and other establishments, according to Seko.

The electricity production on the island amounted to 1.89 million kilowatts. It also received power from the main island of Honshu, after the government sought energy support from other electricity companies in the country to resolve the blackouts, especially in hospitals.

It is expected that with the resumption of operations in thermal and hydroelectric plants throughout Friday the capacity will rise to 3.12 million kilowatts, around 80 percent of the maximum production recorded a day before the earthquake. The electric company, therefore, urged people to save as much energy as possible.

The 6.7-magnitude earthquake on Thursday triggered an immediate shutdown of the main Tomato thermal power plant in Atsuma, which accounted for half of the electricity production on the island, and other power plants, leaving 2.95 million houses and buildings without electricity.

The power cut also affected transport services, which will resume their services in the coming hours.

The high-speed railway operator JR Hokkaido said it will resume operations around noon, while the New Chitose Airport, the largest in Sapporo, is scheduled to reopen later on Friday for incoming flights.</s>Manufacturing operations in Hokkaido island in north Japan are likely to be suspended for about a week, due to power outage in the entire region following a 6.7 magnitude earthquake at around 03:08 am local time Thursday (11:08 GMT Wednesday).

Japan's Toyota Motor halted operation of its automotive component manufacturing plant in Tomakomai City, and steel plants of Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corp, Japan Steel Works, and Mitsubishi Steel, all located in Muroran City, shut down due to the Hokkaido-wide power outage.

Three Japanese beer brewers Kirin, Asahi and Sapporo, the main end-users of aluminum sheets used for cans, also halted production at their Hokkaido plants.

Read the full story, "Power outage cripples manufacturing in quake-hit Hokkaido," from S&P Global Platts.</s>TOKYO (AP) — Japanese authorities say 37 people have been confirmed dead from a powerful earthquake that struck the northern island of Hokkaido last week.

The Hokkaido government said Sunday that two people remain missing and one other person has no vital signs. Rescue workers are using backhoes and shovels to search for the missing in a tangle of dirt and the rubble of homes left by multiple landslides in the town of Atsuma. All but four of the victims are from the community of 4,600 people.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited a hard-hit area of Sapporo, the main city in Hokkaido.

The magnitude 6.7 earthquake before daybreak Thursday knocked out power and train service across Hokkaido. It took two days to restore electricity to most of the island of 5.4 million people.
The death toll from the earthquake in Hokkaido, Japan, rises to 39. More people remain missing.