Tsunami warning issued after quake off Fukushima in Japan

A powerful quake off the northeast Japanese shor.

Authorities said tsunamis with waves of up to three meters were “expected to arrive imminently” and ordered immediate evacuations in the Fukushima Prefecture.

Kyodo News agency reported that a fire broke out at a petroleum complex in the town of Iwaki, but that it had been put out.

“I felt a strong shaking, but it was weaker than the natural disaster in 2011”, a Fukushima prefecture man told NHK.

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All 48 reactor buildings have spent fuel pools that house thousands of fuel assemblies because Japan has yet to build a final disposal site due to opposition from residents near candidate sites.

A magnitude 7.4 natural disaster struck off Fukushima prefecture on Tuesday morning, sending tsunami waves toward the Japanese coast.

“I felt like the lessons of 3/11 were really taken to heart”, Krauth said. And it was so bad.

An quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 struck northeastern Japan’s Fukushima on Tuesday, the weather agency said. “But nothing fell from shelves”.

Japan Meteorological Agency’s quake and volcano observations division director Koji Nakamura addresses a news conference next to the map showing an natural disaster epicentre off the coast of Fukushima prefecture, in Tokyo, Japan November 22, 2016.

He said decommissioning work at the destroyed Dai-ichi plant had been temporarily suspended because of the natural disaster.

Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said at least three people were seriously injured with broken bones – two women in their 80s and one in her 60s. Residents near the coast were told to seek higher ground and not to visit the shore until the warning is lifted.

The first tsunami waves hit about an hour later.

But on the day now known as “3/11”, some of these failed due to power outages after the magnitude 9.0 quake, while many firefighters were killed when the waves – 30 meters (100 feet) high in places – rushed ashore. A 50-foot-high wave inundated the Tohoku region, north of Fukushima, claiming 18,000 lives.

Katushiro Abe, 47, an official at the Ishinomaki Tourism Association in Miyagi Prefecture, was on an early shift so he was already in his office when the quake struck. It stopped operating at 6.10 a.m. local time as a result of the quake. “We stayed in touch by email”, he added of his family. Tsunami waves of 1-3 meters (3-10 feet) are possible, according to the US Geological Survey, which said the quake struck 37 kilometers (23 miles) east-southeast of Namie at a depth of 11.4 kilometers (7 miles).

The same northeast Japan region was hit by a devastating quake and tsunami in 2011.

“Aftershocks could continue not only for five years but as long as 100 years”, Yasuhiro Umeda, a Kyoto University seismologist, said on a talk show on Japanese broadcaster NTV.

In some areas, water could be seen moving up rivers, which funnel the waves to even greater heights, but remained well within flood embankments.