Two powerful quakes hit southern Japan a day apart, killing at least 41 people as@ 18 April 2016. The first one with a magnitude of 6.2 struck on Thursday 14 April 2016 and the second one with a magnitude of 7.3 struck on Saturday 16 April 2016. The epicentre of Saturday’s (April 16) quake was near the city of Kumamoto and measured at a shallow depth of 10 km , the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. The shallower a quake, the more likely it is to cause damage. Buildings were reduced to rubble, including a university dormitory and apartment complexes, with dozens of people unaccounted for over a wide area.
Around 70,000 people have been evacuated, including 300 from an area close to a dam thought to be at risk of collapse. A hospital was left teetering by Saturday morning's 7.0 quake, with doctors and patients rushed from the building in darkness.
Isolated villages in the mountainous area of Kumamoto were completely cut off by landslides and damage to roads, with at least 1,000 people believed trapped in one area alone.
Aerial footage showed a bridge on a main trunk road had crashed onto the carriageway below it, its pillars felled. The quake came as emergency responders were working to reach areas already affected by a 6.2 magnitude tremor that struck late Thursday.
Aftershocks continued to rock Kumamoto and its surroundings, an area unaccustomed to the powerful quakes that regularly shake other parts of seismically-prone Japan.
Thursday's initial quake affected older buildings and killed nine people, but Saturday's brought newer structures crashing down, including a municipal office in the city of Uto.
The total number of deaths rose to 32.
Nearly 1,000 people have been hurt, 184 of them seriously.
Japan, one of the most seismically active countries in the world, suffered a massive undersea quake on March 11, 2011 that sent a tsunami barreling into the country's northeast coast.
Some 18,500 people were left dead or missing, and several nuclear reactors went into meltdown at the Fukushima plant in the worst atomic accident in a generation.
