Powerful quake, tsunami kills hundreds in Japan

TOKYO (AP) — For more than two terrifying, seemingly endless minutes Friday, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan shook apart homes and buildings, cracked open highways and unnerved even those who have learned to live with swaying skyscrapers. Then came a devastating tsunami that slammed into northeastern Japan and killed hundreds of people.

The violent wall of water swept away houses, cars and ships. Fires burned out of control. Power to cooling systems at two nuclear power plants was knocked out, forcing thousands of nearby residents to be evacuated. A boat was caught in the vortex of a whirlpool at sea.

The death toll rose steadily throughout the day, but the true extent of the disaster was not known because roads to the worst-hit areas were washed away or blocked by debris and airports were closed.

After dawn Saturday, the scale of destruction became clearer.

Aerial scenes of the town of Ofunato showed homes and warehouses in ruins. Sludge and high water spread over acres of land, with people seeking refuge on roofs of partially submerged buildings. At one school, a large white "SOS" was spelled out in English.

Atsushi Koshi, a 24-year-old call center worker in the coastal city of Tagajo, said he could still see black smoke rising and added that his cousin remained trapped with about 200-300 other people on the roof of a department store near the hard-hit port of Sendai in Miyagi prefecture.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said an initial assessment found "enormous damage," and the Defense Ministry was sending troops to the hardest-hit region.

President Barack Obama pledged U.S. help following what he called a potentially "catastrophic" disaster. One U.S. aircraft carrier is already in Japan and a second was on its way, he said. A U.S. ship was also heading to the Marianas Islands to assist, he added.

The entire Pacific had been put on alert — including coastal areas of South America, Canada and Alaska — but waves were not as bad as expected.

The magnitude-8.9 offshore quake struck at 2:46 p.m. local time and was the biggest to hit Japan since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. It ranked as the fifth-largest earthquake in the world since 1900 and was nearly 8,000 times stronger than one that devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, last month, scientists said.

Japan's worst previous quake was a magnitude 8.3 in Kanto that killed 143,000 people in 1923, according to USGS. A 7.2-magnitude quake in Kobe killed 6,400 people in 1995.

Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire" — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 percent of the world's quakes occur, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 countries. A magnitude-8.8 temblor that shook central Chile in February 2010 also generated a tsunami and killed 524 people. (report from Philstar.com)