TOKYO – A magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit central Japan’s Nagano prefecture and left at least 14 people with injuries of varying degrees of severity, after collapsing several homes and causing water cuts and power outages, the NHK public network reported.The hardest hit town was Hakuba at 200 kilometers (124 miles) northeast of Tokyo, where the quake’s epicenter was located and where at least five houses were partially knocked down, though the 21 people including a 2-year-old boy who were inside the buildings were successfully rescued by emergency management teams.
Two of them have been admitted to hospital, though the severity of their injuries has not been announced.
In the Omachi district of Nagano city, capital of the prefecture, another 12 people have been sent to hospital emergency rooms, three of them with serious injuries, NHK said.
An army emergency management team has been sent to the area to help with the rescue work and the repair of material damages.
The temblor, which took place at 10:08 local time in the northern part of Nagano prefecture, with an epicenter at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), has been followed be a series of aftershocks.
NHK has shown pictures taken in Nagano showing houses partially demolished and regional highways on which piles of rocks and trees have fallen.
Japan is located over the so-called Ring of Fire, one of the world’s most active seismic zones, and suffers earthquakes with relative frequency, so that the country’s infrastructures are especially designed to resist the temblors
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