In Sheikh Jalal, about a two-hour drive from Burka, one of the most devastated areas, AFP journalists saw aid trucks full of food, military vehicles, rescue workers and local residents stuck where roads had been completely washed out.

The military was using heavy machinery to pave the way, as well as to free aid trucks stuck in the mud.

Mohammad Ali Aryanfar, part of a team from the Turkish Hak Humanitarian Relief Association trying to deliver food to Burka, said they had been on the road since early morning Sunday but were blocked in Sheikh Jalal.

“Our compatriots there (in Burka) need assistance and we pray that the road opens and we reach the area,” he told AFP.

“People’s houses have been destroyed and they don’t have anything, they don’t have shelters,” he added.

The United Nations World Food Programme shared a photo on social media site X of WFP-stamped bags of flour strapped to donkeys’ backs, saying it had to “resort to every alternative to get food to the survivors who lost everything” in Baghlan, as most of the affected areas were “inaccessible by trucks”.

The Taliban government refugees ministry said on Sunday that 315 people had been killed and more than 1,600 people were injured in the flooding in Baghlan.

More than 2,600 homes have been damaged or destroyed and 1,000 cattle killed, it added.

Farmland has also been swamped in the poverty-wracked nation where 80 percent of its more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.

WFP confirmed a toll of more than 300 dead in Baghlan to AFP on Saturday.

Taliban authorities and non-governmental groups warned that the death toll could rise.

About 600,000 people live in the five most severely impacted districts in Baghlan, according to NGO Save the Children.

So far this year, “nearly 13,000 people in Afghanistan have been impacted by disasters caused by extreme weather, including floods and landslides”, it said in a statement.

The country, ravaged by four decades of war, is one of the world’s poorest and, according to scientists, one of the worst prepared to face the consequences of global warming.

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Four people remain missing on the same Shakadang Trail in Taroko national park, famed for its rugged mountainous terrain. Search and recovery work was set to resume after being called off on Friday afternoon because of aftershocks.

At least 12 people were killed by the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck on Wednesday morning off Taiwan’s east coast, and 10 others were still missing.

More than 600 people – including about 450 at a hotel in the Taroko park – remained stranded, cut off by rockslides and other damage in different areas. However, many were known to be safe as rescuers deployed helicopters, drones and smaller teams with dogs to reach them.

On Friday, rescuers freed nine people trapped in a winding cave popular with tourists called the Tunnel of Nine Turns in the island’s mountainous east, while locating two others who were feared dead.

“I kept praying and praying,” said a woman evacuated from the cave, adding that the earthquake had sounded like “a bomb”.

Among the four missing on Shakadang Trail were a family of five. The two bodies found on Friday were a man and a woman but they had not yet been identified, according to Taiwanese media reports.

In the city of Hualien, authorities allowed residents to enter a building with a crumbling facade in 15-minute intervals so they could retrieve their belongings.

Some opted to throw mattresses and bags of clothing out the window, while a young mother slowly carried a cot out for her 10-month-old baby.

“We are told the building has become dangerous and there probably won’t be another chance to move our things afterwards,” said the 24-year-old woman.

“During the big quake … I was only thinking about protecting my baby at the time,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be so serious”.

Ten minutes away, workers started demolishing a building named Uranus that was tilting at a 45-degree angle after half its first floor pancaked.

As night fell, workers used a crane to twist the roof off the concrete structure.

Next to Uranus, a digital sign on another building said: “Don’t give up! Hualien add oil!”, using a Chinese expression of support.

The national disaster agency said more than 1,100 people had been injured.

Meanwhile, Taiwan lashed out at Bolivia on Saturday for expressing solidarity with China after the quake on the island Beijing views as its own.

Bolivia’s foreign ministry issued a statement on Friday saying the country “expresses its solidarity with the sister People’s Republic of China, in the face of the loss of life and severe material damage caused by a large earthquake that occurred in recent hours off the coast of Taiwan”.

Taiwan foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday: “You shouldn’t be the evil, expansionist PRC’s pathetic puppet that jumps when Beijing says jump.

“Just like Taiwan, Bolivia is NOT part of communist China. No more, no less,” he added.

Taiwan’s relatively low number of deaths from such a powerful earthquake has been attributed to strict construction standards and widespread public education campaigns on the earthquake-prone island.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck in 1999 killed 2,400 people.

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The biggest quake to hit since one that struck central Taiwan in 1999 triggered landslides in Hualien County and caused loss of contact with over 150 people, local authorities and reports said.

Nearly 1,000 people were also believed to have been stranded in Taroko park, a major tourist spot featuring a gorge in a mountainous area, according to local reports.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen set up an emergency response office with military personnel dispatched to quake-hit areas for relief operations.

President-elect Lai Ching-te, the current vice president who will be inaugurated as Tsai’s successor on May 20, visited Hualien and said saving lives is the top priority, according to the presidential office.

High-speed railway services on the island were partially suspended and major expressways in its east were closed due to debris, but the safety of all its nuclear plants was confirmed.

In Japan, meanwhile, its meteorological agency said small tsunami of up to 30 cm reached the islands of Yonaguni, Ishigaki and Miyako in Okinawa Prefecture. A tsunami alert for the southern prefecture was later lifted.

Taiwan’s authorities said the epicenter of the 7:58 a.m. temblor was located at a depth of 15.5 km in the Pacific Ocean, 25 km south-southeast of Hualien County Hall. The quake’s intensity was measured at upper 6 in Hualien on Taiwan’s 7-tier scale, according to local reports.

The quake registered 4 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Yonaguni, said the Japan Meteorological Agency. Its epicenter was at a depth of 23 kilometers, some 250 km west-southwest of Ishigaki Island.

Taiwan’s meteorological authority put the magnitude of the quake at 7.2, while Japan’s said it registered 7.7.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan will “swiftly offer support” to Taiwan if requested. In a post to X, formerly Twitter, the premier called Taiwan “a neighbor across the sea” and expressed his sympathy for victims of the quake.

In Hualien, the quake caused a five-story building to tilt with its first floor collapsing, while a nine-story building was also left leaning. Schools and offices suspended activities.

Chang Hung-chuan, 62, who lives near the leaning nine-story building, told Kyodo News that he could feel the latest temblor was different from other earthquakes because it lasted longer than usual.

“When it happened I felt numb because usually in Hualien we have plenty of earthquakes, but this was different. We were shaken up and down and from side to side. I knew something was wrong,” he said.

Rescue workers were trying to get a trapped woman out of the tilted nine-story building while aftershocks continued, but she was later confirmed dead. Areas near the building were cordoned off.

The owner of a Hualien cafe told Kyodo News via telephone that jolts lasted about two minutes and they were so powerful that he could not keep standing. “I was scared but felt relieved because nobody in the neighborhood was injured,” he said.

The temblor was felt across Taiwan and a series of aftershocks continued to rock the island, with schools evacuating children to open sports fields for safety. In the capital Taipei, debris has fallen off some buildings and monuments, including the archway at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, local media reports said.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, temporarily evacuated its employees from some of its plants in northwestern Hsinchu following the quake and decided to halt construction of its new production facilities on the island for safety checks.

In Okinawa, flights were temporarily suspended at Naha airport following the issuance of the tsunami warning, with passengers urged to move to higher floors of the terminal building. The airport is located on the coast of Okinawa Island.

Across the Taiwan Strait, jolts were also felt in Fujian, Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, temporarily disrupting railway services in mainland China, according to Chinese media reports.

The Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council said Beijing is willing to provide disaster relief assistance and extends its “sincere sympathy to the Taiwan compatriots” affected by the quake, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

But Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council turned down the offer, according to the island’s media.

China and Taiwan have been governed separately since they split in 1949 following a civil war.

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Climate-fueled outbreaks: In Southern California, an atmospheric river unleashed more than a foot of rain in parts of the region at the start of February. These types of storms also ravaged the state last year, following a decades-long period of drought. The climate-fueled cycle of rain and drought is driving an uptick in a fungal disease known as coccidioidomycosis, or Valley fever, reported Grist last week. As it rains, the fungi proliferates in the soil, and when it dries out, spores are kicked up from the ground and into people’s noses or throats, potentially leading to pneumonia-like symptoms of cough and fever.

Scientists sounded the alarm bells for rising Valley fever cases due to changing environmental conditions in 2022, but the data has since become even more stark. There were more than 9,280 new cases of Valley fever with onset dates in 2023, which is the highest number ever recorded in this region by the California Department of Public Health. Around 200 people in the United States die from severe cases of this respiratory disease every year.

Also mixed into the post-storm soup of ocean water, fungi spores, rain and debris in California? Millions of gallons of untreated sewage. This bacteria-ridden wastewater poses a severe public health threat, particularly for those closest to the California-Tijuana border, which I wrote about earlier in February. Two local San Diego doctors I spoke with told me a particularly unsettling statistic: After Tropical Storm Hilary slammed into Southern California in August 2023, their practice saw a 560 percent increase in diarrheal illness cases.

A report released last week by scientists at San Diego State University further underscored the severity of this public health threat, adding that wastewater can also carry toxic chemicals alongside bacteria. California government representatives are currently advocating for $310 million in federal funds to refurbish the state’s dilapidated sewage treatment plant at the border — an increasingly urgent request as the state currently faces another round of storms fueled by the atmospheric rivers.

Disease, water and war: Unfortunately, this kind of post-storm sewage overflow can be seen well beyond California. In November, wastewater flowed through the streets of Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas War as storms pummeled the region and sanitation services stopped operating. With a short supply of clean drinking water, civilian camps were ravaged by disease, and cases of diarrhea in children under five increased from 48,000 to 71,000 in just one week starting Dec. 17, according to UNICEF.

“Our whole family has diarrhea that seems to be caused by the water we drink, or the cold weather,” Mahmoud Aziz, a 36-year-old who fled to Rafah, told the Washington Post on Dec. 13.  “We leave the windows open because of the bombing; we are afraid of the glass if there is a bombing.”

On Feb. 12, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 people in Rafah.

Halting the Run on Dwindling Groundwater

A judge in Montana recently ruled in favor of landowners and ranchers fighting against a housing development project near Helena that could have put further stress on steadily declining groundwater reserves.

Public defiance: Initially, the state and county governments had signed off on a developer’s plans to build 39 homes that would pull their water from wells, a project that was challenged by local residents in central Montana. But Broadwater County District Court Judge Michael McMahon found that the county commission and state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNRC) had conducted an “abjectly deficient” environmental assessment for the housing construction.

His 85-page order stated that the offices’ approval of the project displayed “hostility” toward a previous court ruling that requires the government to consider the potential harms to the environment and groundwater before allowing for development.

“It should give DNRC pause that citizens with seemingly no legal training appear to have a better grasp of the exempt well limits than DNRC, the agency charged with administering the Water Use Act,” McMahon wrote.

While the coalition fighting this project celebrated the ruling, developers worried about its long-term implications.

“Where are we going to house citizens of Montana?” Eugene Graf, president of the Montana Building Industry Association, told The New York Times, adding that he hopes state lawmakers revise the law.

Shutting off the tap: If upheld, the “landmark” decision has the potential to curtail many new development projects in rural Montana, reported the Montana Free Press. The ruling isn’t the first of its kind: At the end of January, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state can restrict new groundwater pumping if it will negatively affect other users and wildlife, while Arizona’s governor is pushing for broad reforms and the creation of groundwater-minded laws across the state, as my colleague Wyatt Myskow reported in December.

These actions come amid a widespread reckoning against rampant groundwater usage. Last August, a New York Times investigation revealed that much of the U.S. is facing drastic declines in their aquifers as climate-fueled droughts force residents to rely more on groundwater supplies for water than rain or snowpack. More recently, a study showed that this pattern can be seen globally, with aquifers shrinking around the world.

But not all hope is lost.

“We also find cases where declining groundwater trends have been reversed following clever interventions,” Scott Jasechko, a water resources expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara who co-led the study, told my colleague Liza Gross.

For example, Tucson, Arizona, reversed groundwater declines in some areas by constructing “leaky ponds,” which seeped much-needed water into aquifers, the study’s authors wrote in The Conversation.

More Top Climate News

Hawaii is Considering a ‘Climate Tax’ for Tourists: Gov. Josh Green is spearheading a push to charge island visitors with a $25 tax to help offset the environmental impact of tourism, Jeremy Yurow reports for USA Today. The proposed bill would allocate the money toward initiatives to restore coral reefs, build greener infrastructure and implement measures to prevent wildfires like the ones that tore through Lahaina on Maui in August.

A New Satellite Tool Will Help Users Map Methane Leaks: Google recently partnered with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund to launch an AI-based satellite tool that could offer the most detailed look yet of global methane emissions from oil and gas operations. This could help governments pinpoint and plug the “types of machinery that contribute most to methane leaks,” Yael Maguire, who leads geo-sustainability efforts at Google, told James O’Donnell for MIT Technology Review.

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That day, the heaviest rain in 40 years fell, causing water levels at the dam to spike. The dam, still incomplete at the time, was breached, and many homesteads in the surrounding areas were flooded.

The government declared a state of emergency in the affected areas, launching rescue and relief efforts. The military also came with marching orders.

“The soldiers came and told us to leave, and we left,” Wadyachitsve, now 48, told Al Jazeera. “I thought I would be back after the floods.”

Those affected and at risk were relocated to sites like Chingwizi in Mwenezi District – about 2,500 households upstream of the dam and another 4,000 households downstream.

But the new location was no good, Wadyachitsve said. He said his old home was in a good area.

“The land had green pastures for the livestock. The sun was not as hot, and we had rivers close to us,” he said. “Life is very hard in Chingwizi.”

The mud and grass-thatched house he now lives in with his wife and five children is a far cry from his former home of 30 years in Tugwi Mukosi – a brick, asbestos-roofed, two-bedroom house. During windy periods, his current house is violently shaken, is damaged and requires repairs.

Climate change-induced droughts and events like 2019’s Cyclone Idai that washed away this bridge along the Umvumvu river after Cyclone Idai in Chimanimani have worsened things in Zimbabwe [File: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters]

‘Life is just hell here’

For years, droughts and changing rainfall patterns have contributed to water shortages in parts of rural and urban Zimbabwe, impacting agriculture, industry and domestic water supplies.

Climate change-induced droughts and events like 2019’s Cyclone Idai worsened things, leaving villagers at risk of starvation and in need of alternative water sources.

This was also the case in Tugwi Mukosi in southeastern Zimbabwe, which has long grappled with low rainfall. Completion of the dam, long touted as the solution to water scarcity, was also meant to provide irrigation and power a 12-megawatt hydroelectric plant on site.

Ultimately, the dam changed the lives of those living around it – but for the worse.

“Life is just hell here,” said Sonia Madhuva, a 40-year-old mother of four who now lives in Chingwizi. Before the flood, she owned more than 7 hectares (17 acres) of arable land. She said the government promised her 4 hectares (10 acres) during the displacement but she was given only 1 hectare (2.5 acres).

“I can’t grow anything to sustain myself on that land. They told us to take what was on offer,” she told Al Jazeera.

Many people in the area said they cannot grow cash crops or earn a living from the land. They have also lost most of their livestock because there is no land for animals to graze any more and drinking water is hard to get for the 20,000 displaced people at Chingwizi.

“The water is bitter, salty, and when you drink it, it’s hard to pass urine. The water is not good,” Wadyachitsve said.

Those who are displaced are still looking forward to the irrigation infrastructure promised by the government, for their new plots, so they can grow crops all year round and earn some much-needed income. They and their neighbours currently rely on pipes passing through the area that comes from a nearby ethanol and sugar cane plant.

“If we had irrigation, our lives would be better,” Madhuva said.

High school students have to walk almost 10km (6 miles) to get to the only school in the community, and it barely has any classrooms and has no toilet.

Additionally, early marriages are on the rise among high school students, Wadyachitsve said.

Land reclamation

But for the displaced, the most painful issue remains the plots of land they have lost.

In Zimbabwe, which seized land from white farmers and redistributed it to Black citizens in 2000 and 2001, land remains an emotional issue.

The country’s founding fathers launched a two-decade guerilla war that ended in 1980 to press for civil liberties and restitution of land to Black people under the auspices of the Lancaster House agreement, a ceasefire that led to independence from Britain in 1980.

But in the early 2000s when the British government did not provide promised funding under the “willing buyer and willing seller” basis, then-President Robert Mugabe ordered the seizure of white-owned farms and resettled landless Blacks in a populist move.

Low productivity on resettled farms and the lack of secure tenure on those lands led many people to question Mugabe’s move in the years that followed.

Even today, some experts blame the current administration for not doing enough to entrench a new system for reclaiming land in post-independence Zimbabwe.

“If you put this government here and then you juxtapose it with the settler regime, you will notice they have the same approach on land dispossession and alienation of the Zimbabwean people from their land,” Farai Maguwu, a leading land rights campaigner in Zimbabwe and director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, told Al Jazeera.

Waiting for compensation

For Wadyachitsve, the barrenness of the land in Chingwizi is a constant reminder of broken promises by the government.

In October 2009, Zimbabwe signed the Kampala Convention on the protection of and assistance for displaced people in Uganda.

Under the convention, states are required to incorporate measures to prevent displacement, protect those who are displaced and provide durable solutions for their reintegration or resettlement.

Displaced people in Chingwizi said each of the 3,500 families there got the local equivalent of only $53 as compensation.

The beneficiaries said they felt cheated because the compensation for livestock and personal belongings was supposed to be in US dollars.

From 2009 to 2016, Zimbabwe adopted the use of US dollars as part of a multicurrency system to replace its plummeting currency as hyperinflation – peaking at 79.6 billion percent on a month-on-month basis – throttled the economy.

So for the displaced, getting compensation in Zimbabwe dollars meant receiving a pittance.

“The compensation was made in Zimbabwe dollars and did not help us in any way. It was eroded by inflation, so we can’t talk of compensation,” Madhuva said.

Rejoice Ngwenya, founder and executive director of the Coalition for Market and Liberal Solutions, told Al Jazeera that full compensation for displacement due to the government’s “development objective”  is a constitutional right.

“Compensation is a statutory obligation, which, if ignored, can be enforced through the courts, so villagers are ignorant, misinformed or merely lethargic,” Ngwenya said.

But the displaced people in Chingwizi said they have nowhere to channel their demands for justice. In 2015, four villagers were convicted of attacking police officers and burning two police vehicles during a protest against the forced relocation of their clinic to Nuanetsi Ranch, 15km (9 miles) away.

Information Minister Jenfas Muswere did not respond to Al Jazeera’s queries on Chingwizi.

Wadyachitsve believes the flooding was a pretext to push him and others off their land.

“They flooded us out of our homes. They created a disaster. They caused the disaster. We were beaten and were given some Zim dollars. That money did not do anything. Life is hard.”

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While regular flights connecting Noto airport in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, and Tokyo’s Haneda airport are limited to one round-trip per day on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays through February, it is hoped they will help bring volunteer workers to the quake-hit area to assist in recovery from the disaster, which left more than 230 dead.

Before the quake struck the Noto Peninsula on the Sea of Japan coast, there were two round-trip flights between the two airports each day. But the airport was forced to suspend services after a gap measuring 10 centimeters in depth and 10 meters in length was found on a runway following the quake.

After temporary repairs were made, the airport started accepting Self-Defense Forces aircraft on Jan. 11 and decided to widen the service to commercial flights as it completed full restoration work.

A 40-year-old woman living in quake-hit Suzu on the peninsula was among 62 passengers aboard a flight that departed for the region from Haneda earlier in the morning. She was visiting her hometown in Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo with her two children when the earthquake struck and has been unable to return until now, she said.

“My car is parked at Noto airport so I was waiting” for flights to resume, she said. “The house was built recently, so I don’t think it has collapsed, but we will have to clean up the inside.”

Passengers were handed two-liter bottles of water by cabin crew as they boarded the plane. While greeting passengers after takeoff, the plane’s captain said, “Please take great care in the area.”

Among them were some of the 75 registered volunteer workers who entered Ishikawa Prefecture Saturday to join cleanup efforts.

Partly because landslides and cracks had severed roads leading to the quake-hit area, local governments were not ready to accept such volunteers until now, with prefectural authorities saying more than 15,000 people have registered from across Japan as of Saturday.

So far, over 43,000 homes have been damaged by the quake and around 230 people have been confirmed dead, the prefecture said.

Among the fatalities, nearly 90 percent of the 129 people whose names were released were found to be victims of collapsed houses, many of whom appear to have died from crushing or suffocation.

Some quake-hit areas with a high proportion of elderly residents have a large number of old wooden houses, suggesting seismic reinforcement work was hindered by financial constraints.

As the Ishikawa prefectural government had been asking individuals to refrain from coming to the quake-hit area, those eligible for volunteer work had previously been limited to people who belonged to organizations with disaster relief knowledge and experience.

Among the newly arrived volunteers was Shuto Kaji, a 30-year-old office worker from western Tokyo, who has been visiting Nanao in Ishikawa Prefecture once or twice a year for the past seven years to teach tennis to local children

“This is my first time volunteering for disaster recovery, but I hope I can be of a little help to Nanao,” he said.

Volunteers worked in pairs to remove water-damaged tatami mats and other debris from homes affected by the disaster. “I can only be grateful,” said local resident Kenichi Kawamura, 55, after receiving assistance.

At a ceremony prior to embarking on their activities, Ishikawa Gov. Hiroshi Hase addressed participants who had gathered wearing blue vests emblazoned with the words “Ishikawa Prefecture volunteer.”

“I thank you for your warm sentiments. I hope you will take good care of yourselves as well,” Hase said.

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He is expected to announce the establishment of a headquarters, which he will lead, dedicated to formulating and executing reconstruction measures in the wake of the magnitude-7.6 earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast, claiming over 230 lives, the sources said.

In the speech scheduled for Tuesday, Kishida is expected to say, “I will be responsible for the restoration of Noto (region) and for the return of disaster victims” forced to evacuate from their homes, the sources said.

The prime minister will refer to the government’s recent decision to double the reserve funds earmarked in the draft budget for fiscal 2024 starting April and vow to exert efforts with the mindset of “doing everything one can” for quake recovery.

The funds were raised to 1 trillion yen ($6.8 billion).

Kishida also plans to express his resolve to restore public trust in politics by increasing the transparency of political funds. This comes in the aftermath of charges against lawyers and former and incumbent accountants of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s factions for misreporting revenues from fundraising parties over many years.

The scandal has dealt a blow to Kishida, sharply pushing down approval ratings for his Cabinet.

He will say that reviving the Japanese economy continues to be his government’s “biggest mission,” the sources said.

To this end, he will pledge to realize pay hikes for part-time and nonregular employees, as well as workers in medical, social welfare and public services and at small and medium-sized firms, the sources said.

On foreign policy, Kishida is likely to voice his intention to deepen Japan’s relationship with the United States, including in the area of economic security, through his planned U.S. visit as a state guest, the sources said.

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In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called for an “all-out effort” to save as many lives as possible during the first 72 hours following the magnitude-7.6 quake disaster, after which the victim survival rate is said to have dropped sharply.

Later in the day, firefighters released a video showing that they had rescued a woman in her 80s from a collapsed house in the hard-hit coastal city of Wajima, three days after the earthquake occurred at 4:10 p.m. on Monday.

The central government plans to allocate roughly 4 billion yen ($28 million) from reserve funds to beef up its response while doubling the number of Self-Defense Forces members engaging in rescue operations and other efforts to 4,600.

The full extent of the damage is yet unclear due to damaged roads and the disruption to communications in Ishikawa Prefecture.

Many people are still believed to be trapped under rubble in Wajima where a major marketplace caught fire and burned down. Some 780 people are stranded in areas such as Wajima and adjacent Suzu as roads leading to the disaster-affected areas have been severed.

A Maritime Self-Defense Force transport ship has arrived off the coast of Wajima and unloaded heavy machinery that will be used for disaster cleanup work.

Concerns also grew that Wednesday’s rainy weather could trigger landslides in quake-hit areas.

More than 30,000 people in Ishikawa Prefecture are staying at evacuation centers as of Thursday. According to the central government, at least 200 buildings have collapsed or are partially damaged.

The Japan Meteorological Agency has said that Monday’s quake, which struck the Noto Peninsula was focused around 30 kilometers east-northeast of Wajima.

The temblor registered 7, the highest level, on Japan’s seismic intensity scale in the adjacent town of Shika, and a major tsunami warning was triggered — the first such case since the M9.0 quake hit northeastern Japan in 2011.

At Wajima Port, tsunami waves of at least 1.2 meters high were detected on Monday.

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The quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 triggered waves of around 1 meter along parts of the west coast with a larger wave expected, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has issued tsunami warnings for the coastal prefectures of Ishikawa, Niigata and Toyama, marking the first major warnings since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan.

A major tsunami warning means there is a possibility of waves more than 3 meters tall.

Russia also issued tsunami warnings in its Far Eastern cities of Vladivostok and Nakhodka.

Some houses have been destroyed and army units have been dispatched to help with rescue operations, top government spokesperson Hayashi Yoshimasa told reporters, adding that authorities were still assessing the extent of the damage.

More strong quakes in the area, where seismic activity has been simmering for more than three years, could occur over coming days, JMA official Toshihiro Shimoyama said.

In comments to the press shortly after the quake struck, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also warned residents to prepare for more disasters.

“Residents need to stay on alert for further possible quakes and I urge people in areas where tsunamis are expected to evacuate as soon as possible,” Kishida said.

“Run!” a bright yellow warning flashed across television screens advising residents in specific areas of the coast to immediately evacuate their homes.

Images carried by local media showed a building collapsing in a plume of dust in the coastal city of Suzu and a huge crack in a road in Wajima where panicked-looking parents clutched their children. The quake also jolted buildings in the capital Tokyo, some 500 km from Wajima on the opposite coast.

More than 36,000 households had lost power in Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, utilities provider Hokuriku Electric Power said.

High-speed rail services to Ishikawa have been suspended while telecom operators Softbank and KDDI reported phone and internet service disruptions in Ishikawa and Niigata, according to their websites.

Japanese airline ANA turned back planes headed to airports in Toyama and Ishikawa, while Japan Airlines canceled most of its services to Niigata and Ishikawa regions and authorities said one of Ishikawa’s airports was closed.

Nuclear plants

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said no irregularities have been confirmed at nuclear power plants along the West Coast, including five active reactors at Kansai Electric Power’s Ohi and Takahama plants in Fukui Prefecture.

Hokuriku’s Shika plant in Ishikawa, the closest nuclear power station to the quake’s epicenter, had already halted its two reactors before the quake for regular inspections and saw no impact from the quake, the agency said.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and devastated towns and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima.

Another quake, known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, hit western Japan in 1995, killing more than 6,000 people, mainly in the city of Kobe.

Monday’s quake struck during the Jan. 1 public holiday when millions of Japanese traditionally visit temples to mark the new year.

In Kanazawa, a popular tourist destination in Ishikawa, images showed the remnants of a collapsed torii gate strewn at the entrance of a shrine as anxious worshippers looked on.

Kanazawa resident Ayako Daikai said she had evacuated to a nearby elementary school with her husband and two children soon after the earthquake hit. Classrooms, stairwells, hallways and the gymnasium were all packed with evacuees, she said.

“I also experienced the Great Hanshin Earthquake, so I thought it would be safest to evacuate,” she told Reuters when contacted by telephone. (Reuters)

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After a period of extreme drought, 2023 brought heavy rains to California. In a three-week period alone in January, nine atmospheric rivers—corridors of moisture concentrated in the atmosphere—pummeled the state with rain, leading to landslides, flooding, and levee breaches. 

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