Strong quake jolts northern Japan

TOKYO (Reuters) - A strong earthquake with a preliminarymagnitude of 7.0 jolted northern Japan on Saturday, killing twopeople, injuring scores, and sending landslides sweeping acrossroads.

The quake, at 8:43 a.m. (12:43 a.m. British time), wascentred in Iwate, a mountainous rural area around 300 km (190miles) north of Tokyo, where the tremor was also felt.

One of those killed was a person caught in a landslide,Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura told reporters. Asecond was killed as he ran out of his house and was run overby a car.

"I saw some shattered windows and broken roof tiles," acity hall worker in Miyagi prefecture told public broadcasterNHK. "There were no collapsed buildings."

Kyodo news agency said more than 80 people were hurt.

Four people were badly injured near the airport in thenortheast coastal city of Sendai as a bus they were travellingin was jolted by the earthquake, TV reported. Machimura saidthe government had set up an emergency response centre.

THOUSANDS STRANDED

Two thousand people were stranded when bullet trains in theregion were halted, a JR East spokesman said, adding it couldtake nine hours to complete safety checks and resume services.

Nuclear power plant operations were unaffected, althoughaftershocks continued and a government official said 22,000people had lost electricity supplies.

The focus of the magnitude 7.0 tremor was 10 km (6 miles)underground in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, the JapanMeteorological Agency said on its website.(http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/14090100384.html) No tsunamiwarning was issued after the quake.

Children and teachers at a daycare centre were injured, andsome highways were closed, Japanese television reported, withaerial pictures showing landslides that had swept through ahouse and swamped some roads.

In worst hit areas, the earthquake was measured at an upper6 on a Japanese intensity scale, which measures ground motion.It may be impossible to keep standing in a quake with thatreading, the meteorological agency says.

"There was a strong vertical tremor, nothing after that," amunicipal worker told NHK.

NUCLEAR PLANTS OK

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc, Japan'sbiggest utility, said two of the company's nuclear power plantsin Fukushima prefecture, just south of Miyagi prefecture, wererunning as usual and there were no disruptions from the quake.

An official at Tohoku Electric Power Co Inc said itsnuclear plants at Onagawa and Higashidori were also operatingas usual.

Top Japanese refiner Nippon Oil Corp's 145,000barrel-per-day Sendai refinery appeared not to have beendamaged after the quake, a company official said. The refineryis currently shut for scheduled maintenance.

Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world's mostseismically active areas. The country accounts for about 20percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.

In October 2004, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8struck the Niigata region in northern Japan, killing 65 peopleand injuring more than 3,000.

That was the deadliest quake since a magnitude 7.3 tremorhit the city of Kobe in 1995, killing more than 6,400.

(Additional reporting by Isabel Reynolds, Yoko Kubota,Linda Sieg, Yuzo Saeki, Chikafumi Hodo, Osamu Tsukimori;Writing by Hugh Lawson; Editing by Rodney Joyce and JerryNorton)