Residents of a Japanese island chain wondered what else nature could throw at them Sunday after they were hit by a powerful earthquake, a volcanic eruption and a deadly typhoon -- all in 24 hours.
The quake, which measured 6.0 on the Richter scale and was the latest of a series, hit the Pacific island of Kozujima, about 170 kilometers (105 miles) south of Tokyo, just before four in the morning.
It triggered 10 landslides and cracks appeared in sides of a mountain at two spots but no one was injured, a spokesman for Kozujima police station said.
The quake struck just nine hours after Mount Oyama erupted on the nearby island of Miyakejima, spewing white pillars of ash and steam hundreds of meters into the air. It was the first eruption in 17 years at the volcano.
The island chain was already hit by Typhoon Kirogi early Saturday. The storm brought heavy rains which sent mud and sand crushing two houses and a shrine office on Kozujima.
"I was asleep when the quake hit. No objects tumbled or fell from racks but the house creaked," said Koji Ichikawa, deputy superintendent of the island's police station.
"There have been many quakes recently and it was a major one but not the biggest. I didn't feel any threat to my life."
On Miyakejima, the eruption occured just nine days after authorities lifted an evacuation order, but there were no plans to reinstate it.
There was a "minimal amount of steam rising about 20-30 meters (67-100 feet) into the sky" from the volcano Sunday, a Miyakejima police spokesman said. "There is no danger of an eruption involving a magma flow."
"There is a cave-in, about 700-800 meters (2,310-2,640 feet) across, at the top of Mout Oyama," Setsuya Nakada, a seismologist at Tokyo University, told reporters after observing the crater by helicopter.
He also spotted a few cinders about one meter wide in the caved-in area.
Koji Takada, an official at the meteorological agency's division for monitoring earthquakes and tidal waves, said earlier that the eruption was a "very small-scale steam explosion that contained volcanic ash."
"Magma is away from Miyakejima and there is no likelihood of another eruption or a bigger eruption now."
During the typhoon, 411 millimeters (16.44 inches) of rain fell on Oshima, just north of Kozujima and Miyakejima.
Although four people drowned in swelling canals when Kirogi hit Japan's Pacific seaboard, there have been no reports of deaths or injuries in nature's latest onslaught on the islands.
A week ago, a 32-year-old man was crushed to death in a landslide on Kozujima after an earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale.
The 813-meter (2,683-feet) Mount Oyama blows its top roughly every 20 years. In the last eruption in 1983 about 500 homes were buried by lava on the western side of the island, but there were no injuries.
Itsuo Furuya, the head of the monitoring division, told reporters that seismic activity on Kozujima would continue for "several weeks."
"There is the possibility that earthquakes of a similar magnitude may recur on the island," he said.
Tens of thousands of tremors have rocked the scenic island chain, which draws tourists from the main island of Honshu, since June 26th -- TOKYO (AFP)
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