Tokyo — A powerful earthquake struck off the northern Japanese coast Monday, prompting the Japan Meteorological Agency to issue a tsunami alert in the region.
The quake registering a preliminary magnitude of 7.5 occurred off the coast of Sanriku in northern Japan at around 4:53 p.m. (2:53 a.m. Eastern on Sunday), at a depth of about 6 miles below the sea surface, the agency said.
Japan’s NHK public television said a tsunami of up to 10 feet could hit the area shortly, and there were warnings for residents along the eastern coasts of Iwate Prefecture, on Japan’s main island of Honshu, and on the northern island of Hokkaido, to evacuate inland to higher ground.
It has been 15 years since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck, unleashing a massive tsunami on March 11, 2011, ravaging parts of northern Japan. More than 22,000 people were killed and nearly half a million people were forced to flee their homes, most of them due to tsunami damage.
Some 160,000 people fled their homes in the Fukushima Prefecture because of the radiation spewed from the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. About 26,000 of them haven’t returned because they resettled elsewhere, their hometowns remain off-limits or they have lingering concerns about radiation.
There were initial reports in Japanese media that at least two nuclear power plants in the northeast region under a tsunami warning on Monday were thus far unaffected by the earthquake. It was the tsunami that came after the 2011 temblor that caused most of the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, however.