By Anton Bridge, Yuka Obayashi and Joseph Campbell
KUMAMOTO, Japan, July 29 (Reuters) – Workers in a mall in southern Japan described being thrown to the floor or enveloped in a disorienting cloud of dust by a massive 7.1-magnitude quake that rattled the building on Tuesday. They were the lucky ones. Just over an hour later, a deadly disaster struck.
Hundreds of shoppers and store employees, quickly ushered by staff to evacuate, watched on in horror as an explosion ripped through the building, exposing the structure’s steel beams and catapulting debris across the parking lot.
First responders, initially fearful of entering the wreckage, hauled eight people from the partially collapsed site early on Wednesday, among them three dead. The status of three store workers remains unknown, mall operator Aeon said, adding that it was investigating a possible gas leak.
“I thought a bomb had gone off,” Takateru Sonoda, 41, who runs a combined hair salon and cafe near the mall, told news agency Jiji Press.
“There were people calling on others to evacuate and sirens were ringing out. Nearby roads were gridlocked, it was a state of panic,” Sonoda said.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said on Wednesday it was a “race against time” to rescue those still trapped in the mall and others affected by the quake. Around 170 soldiers have been deployed to help with rescue operations at the site.
MALL TOUTED SAFETY FEATURES
The mall, the biggest in the prefecture, had just reopened last month as a new and improved shopping and entertainment complex to commemorate its recovery from another deadly tremor a decade ago.
After being badly damaged in the magnitude 7.3 Kumamoto earthquake in April 2016, the operator highlighted its seismically reinforced ceilings and overall improvements to safety and resilience as part of its redevelopment.
Still, one worker manning one of the mall’s 200 stores told the Yomiuri newspaper that Tuesday’s temblor shook the building for 10 seconds and brought him to his knees.
Another 22-year-old employee at the mall’s cinema told the newspaper that the quake that struck around 4.30 p.m. threw up a cloud of dust, adding to the panic.
Aeon President Akio Yoshida told a press conference on Wednesday that staff evacuated 3,000 shoppers within half an hour after the quake hit. But an unlucky few were inside when, 50 minutes later, the explosion occurred.
“We confirmed that all customers had been evacuated. We believed that employees had also evacuated, but it later emerged that some people had remained inside, or returned for whatever reason,” Yoshida said, adding that one survivor was found injured in the bathroom.
Across the street in a pub about 300 metres (330 yards) from the mall, Kazuya Tsurunaga was cleaning up dishes and glasses broken by the earlier quake when he heard the deafening blast.
“A large cloud of smoke was billowing up, and because the wind happened to be blowing, and the wind direction was toward the shop, it was like volcanic ash was falling around us,” he told broadcaster TBS.
For the first few hours, police officers and firefighters did not enter the wreckage because of the risk of further building collapse amid a series of aftershocks, a police official said. By the end of Tuesday, more than 100 aftershocks had occurred in Kumamoto.
‘HIGHLY LIKELY’ GAS CAUSED BLAST
Video footage shot by a police officer inside the building early on Wednesday showed large sections of the ceiling had collapsed, store fronts had been blown open and furniture was strewn across the floor.
All 25 cats left behind in a cat cafe during the hasty evacuation were rescued on Wednesday, the store owner said in a social media post, thanking rescue workers.
Some rescuers reported smelling gas, Japan’s government spokesperson Minoru Kihara told a press conference on Wednesday. A TV correspondent reporting from the site said an emergency vehicle repeatedly urged people not to go near the mall due to a possible gas leak.
Aeon officials said the mall used LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) rather than piped gas, pumped into the building from an outdoor storage tank. The system had undergone a safety check as recently as last month, the officials said.
The outdoor storage tank appeared intact after the blast, footage showed.
Piped gas is automatically shut off by network operators if seismic activity reaches a certain threshold or the line is damaged.
But LPG also has such safety protocols, an official with the Japan LPG sales association said. Microcomputer-controlled meters automatically shut off supply if they detect abnormalities such as leaks or pressure fluctuations, and are designed to cut supply during major seismic activity, the official said.
Gas suppliers and safety service providers can also remotely shut off supply via radio transmission in emergencies, he added.
Yoshida said the possibility the explosion was caused by gas was “very high”, but that thorough investigations were needed to understand what exactly went wrong.
“We had not fully anticipated that an explosion of this kind could occur,” he said. “In the course of operating Aeon mall over the years, we have never had an accident like this.”
(Reporting by Anton Bridge, Satoshi Sugiyama and Yuka Obayashi in Tokyo; Joseph Campbell and Tim Kelly in Kumamoto; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Stephen Coates and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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