Powerful earthquake hits southern Japan, bringing down mall

Rescue crews in Japan are working around the clock to try to find people trapped inside a collapsed mall brought down by a powerful earthquake.

The 6.8-magnitude quake hit one of Japan’s southern islands, knocking out power, causing fires, injuring dozens and leaving others presumed dead.

The scary moments — at about 4:30 p.m. local time — were captured on dozens of cameras as the ground shook on Japan’s southern Kyushu Island.

In Kumamoto, the earthquake led to an explosion in a mall that brought down part of the structure, leaving dozens trapped inside and some thought to be dead.

Japan’s Prime Minister says the full extent of the damage and casualties is still being assessed.

“We have already confirmed extensive damage, including casualties, collapsed buildings, damaged roads and fires,” Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said.

Crews worked late into the night at the mall, where police say several have died and fire crews say others are trapped.

The cause of the blast has not been determined, but one side of the mall has been blown away, exposing the steel structure and sending pieces of debris flying across the area.

Elsewhere, roads were ruptured and tens of thousands of homes and businesses lost power. A wall from Kumamoto’s historic castle was also damaged.

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“It was really something,” one witness said. “It didn’t fall down piece by piece, it came crashing down all at once. It really shocked me.”

The castle and the mall were both badly damaged 10 years ago in a much more massive quake that killed 275 people and injured 2,700 more.

Lindsay Schoenbohm, an earth sciences professor at the University of Toronto, said earthquakes like this happen in Japan all the time, adding that today’s quake caused violent shaking measuring near the top of the scale.

“This was a shallow earthquake, it was only about 10 kilometres deep and it happened close to a population centre and so the shaking was actually quite intense,” Schoenbohm said.

Japan is very prone to quakes, accounting for about 20 per cent of the world’s magnitude 6 or higher quakes.

Schoenbohm says that is because the country sits on a number of shifting tectonic plates.

“The entire country of Japan is sliced by faults, so what we saw today was one of these smaller faults that was being set off by the accumulated stresses of all this tectonic activity,” she said.

Japan’s Prime Minister is warning people to be prepared for aftershocks, as several have already rumbled through the area.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate, and thousands of soldiers have been deployed to help.

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