KVIG Informative

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit southern Japan on Tuesday. An hour later, a shopping mall that had already survived the shaking blew apart.

The quake struck near Kumamoto City on the island of Kyushu, killing at least 13 people, cutting power to thousands of homes, and cracking roads across the region. The epicenter sat about 20 kilometers south of Kumamoto City, a city of roughly 700,000 people that also suffered a deadly earthquake a decade ago. Police logged 386 emergency calls in the hours after the shaking, including reports of collapsed buildings and people trapped inside them.

The worst single scene was the Aeon Mall in Kashima Town, the largest shopping center in the prefecture. Local media reported an apparent gas explosion tore through the building roughly an hour after the initial quake, ripping away one entire side of the structure and exposing its steel frame to the parking lot below. Customers had already been evacuated when the blast occurred. Eight people were pulled from the rubble; three of them, including two women in their 20s, died. Mall operator Aeon said four of the roughly 2,700 staff who worked at the center remained unaccounted for, along with seven workers from a nearby factory.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told reporters in Tokyo that people are still waiting to be rescued and called it a race against time, pledging to marshal all available resources on the ground. Authorities ordered roughly 260,000 residents across the prefecture to evacuation centers as aftershocks continued to threaten already-damaged structures.

Yatsushiro, a coastal city near the epicenter, absorbed some of the worst structural damage. Roads into the town buckled and cracked, homes lost sections of roofing, and a handful of buildings collapsed outright. Part of a bridge fell into the Kumagawa River. Many businesses in the area stayed shuttered Wednesday as residents gathered to look at the wreckage rather than reopen.

Hospitals across the prefecture reported being overwhelmed with injured patients even as search crews continued digging through the mall’s ruins. Rescue teams are working against the clock in more than one sense: aftershocks remain a live risk to the partially standing structure, and officials have not said how long the search-and-rescue phase will last before it shifts to recovery.

Kumamoto has been here before. The 2016 earthquakes that struck the same prefecture killed dozens of people and reshaped how Japan enforces building codes in the region. A decade of reinforced construction did not stop this earthquake from killing 13 people in a single day. It may be the difference between the death toll being 13 and something far worse.