Media and residents stand on a collapsed building after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake in Thumane, western Albania, Tuesday. Rescue crews with excavators searched for survivors trapped in toppled apartment buildings and hotels Tuesday as the death toll from a powerful pre-dawn earthquake in Albania climbed to 21, with more than 600 people injured.
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TIRANA - At least four people died after the most powerful earthquake to hit Albania in decades rocked the capital of Tirana and surrounding region early on Tuesday, causing several buildings to collapse and burying residents in the rubble.
The 6.4-magnitude quake struck shortly before 4 a.m. local time (0300 GMT), the US Geological Survey (USGS) said, the second powerful tremor to hit the region in two months.
It was centered 30 kilometers west of Tirana, at a shallow depth of 10 kms, the USGS said.
Two women were found in the rubble of an apartment building in the northern village of Thumane, and a man died in the town of Kurbin after panicking and jumping out of a building, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said.
A dead body, the fourth victim of the earthquake, was pulled out from under a collapsed building in Durres, the defense ministry confirmed.
Emergency workers told local media one of those killed was an elderly woman who had managed to save her grandson by cradling him with her body.
Unverified video footage posted on social media showed what appeared to be a collapsed building in Durres, 40 kms west of Tirana, on the Adriatic coast. Other footage showed buildings with large cracks and fallen masonry, including one apartment with most of a bedroom wall missing.
"Firefighters and army staff are helping residents (caught) under the rubble" in Durres and the nearby village of Thumane, the Defense Ministry spokeswoman told reporters.
An unidentified man, with a wound dressing on his right cheek, told News24 TV his daughter and niece were among those trapped in a collapsed apartment building in Durres.
"I talked with my daughter and niece on the phone. They said they are well and are waiting for the rescue. Could not talk to my wife. There are other families, but I could not talk to them," the man said.
Two government spokesmen told Reuters the biggest damage to buildings was in Durres and a few people had been taken to hospital in Tirana.
A Reuters witness described residents fleeing apartment buildings in Tirana, some carrying babies. Power was down in several neighborhoods.
Three hours after the main tremor, a strong aftershock rocked the city, which is known for its colorful mix of architecture from its Ottoman, Fascist and Soviet past.
Several smaller tremors were recorded in the hour before the main quake, which was also felt across the Balkans and in the southern Italian region of Puglia.
"We were awake because of the previous quakes, but the last one shook us around. Everything at home kept falling down," Refik, a Tirana resident, told Reuters of what happened in his sixth-floor apartment.
Located along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, between Greece and Macedonia, Albania experiences regular seismic activity.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.6 shook the country on Sept. 21, damaging around 500 houses and destroying some. The defense ministry had said it was the most powerful quake in Albania in the last 30 years.
The images of collapsed or semi-collapsed buildings in urban areas suggested Tuesday's quake was more powerful than one in 1979, which razed a neighborhood of the northern town of Shkoder, bordering Montenegro. Neither of those two earlier earthquakes caused any fatalities.
The Balkan nation is the poorest country in Europe, with an average income of less than a third of the European Union average, according to Eurostat data.
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Dorian heading toward Florida on Friday was on track to become a major hurricane with a dangerous storm surge and potential for life-threatening flash floods.
Its maximum sustained winds have reached 105 miles per hour (165 kilometers per hour), making it a Category 2 storm on a five-level scale, the National Hurricane Center said.
It is expected to strengthen over the next few days as it approaches the Bahamas and then Florida over the weekend.
Weather forecasters said Dorian could make landfall on the US east coast as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with the potential to cause life-threatening storm surges.
President Donald Trump cancelled a weekend trip to Poland to focus on preparations for the storm.
Florida has declared a state of emergency, warning the millions of people who live up and down the eastern coast of the Sunshine State to prepare for a potentially huge hurricane.
- 'Catastrophic impacts' -
Georgia -- another southeastern state that could be in the storm's path -- followed suit for 12 counties.
Governor Brian Kemp said the hurricane "has the potential to produce catastrophic impacts to citizens" throughout the southeast coastal region of the United States.
Trump, who has properties including the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a politically important state for his 2020 re-election bid, also warned Floridians to get ready.
"Be prepared... it will be a very big Hurricane, perhaps one of the biggest!" he said on Twitter.
The US Coast Guard said ocean-going commercial vessels should make plans to leave South Florida ports.
"The risk of devastating hurricane-force winds along the Florida east coast and peninsula late this weekend and early next week continues to increase," the NHC warned.
Miami's Ocean Drive, a normally-vibrant strip along the beach, was quiet, with some empty tables and fewer tourists than usual.
Grocery stores were packed with shoppers making last-minute purchases of water, food, propane canisters and other supplies. There were lines at some gasoline stations as drivers filled up their tanks.
One shopper, Magdalena Gomez from Argentina, was preparing for her first hurricane: "If they tell me to go buy water, I go buy water. I do everything they say."
A Rolling Stones concert in Miami originally scheduled for Saturday night was moved up by a day "due to the weather forecast," the band's Twitter account said.
- Puerto Rico spared -
"Strengthening is forecast during the next few days, and Dorian is expected to become a major hurricane on Friday, and remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through the weekend," the NHC said.
The US territory of Puerto Rico, still recovering from a powerful storm two years ago, was largely spared, but the NHC said Dorian could dump up to seven inches (18 centimeters) of rain on some parts of the Bahamas.
In Puerto Rico, the new governor, Wanda Vazquez, gave the all-clear, but there was no let-up in the political storm involving Trump and Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, the island's capital.
"Now that Dorian is going to the east coast let us hope that @realDonaldTrump sets aside his prejudice and racism & moves the federal response to efficiency," the mayor tweeted.
Trump declared a state of emergency in Puerto Rico ahead of Hurricane Dorian's anticipated arrival, authorizing federal assistance, but said that the island is "one of the most corrupt places on earth" and its political system is "broken."
Puerto Rico was devastated in 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm.
A study accepted as valid by the government, which initially put the death toll at 64, estimated that nearly 3,000 people died as a result of that hurricane and the months of disruption that followed.
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High winds blamed on Cyclone Fani more than 900 kilometers away blew tents off the side of Mount Everest on Friday, officials said.
Fallout from the deadly storm, which hit India's Bay of Bengal coast on Friday, spread across South Asia — including the world's highest mountain.
The monster storm was not predicted to go near Nepal, but the country's Meteorological Forecasting Division predicted effect from Fani would cause snow, rain and strong winds in the country.
About 20 tents at Everest's Camp 2, at 6,400 meters (21,000 feet), were affected.
"Very strong winds blew the tents off the mountain but no-one was hurt," Ishwori Poudel, general secretary of the Expedition Operators Association, told AFP.
With the spring climbing season looming, several teams have postponed acclimatisation on Everest fearing the bad weather.
"The effects of that storm mean we are likely to see significant snowfall and high winds on the mountain," expedition company Climbing the Seven Summits wrote on its blog.
The company said its climbers would wait at base camp until the storm has passed.
The Nepalese government has issued a warning to trekking and climbing companies to ensure the safety of tourists, and cautioned helicopters against flying.
The thousands of climbers who flock to Nepal each year to try eight of the world's 14 highest peaks provide a lucrative industry for the impoverished South Asian country.
Nepal has issued a record 377 permits to climb Everest this year.
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Search and rescue workers evacuate an earthquake and tsunami survivor trapped in a collapsed restaurant in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia Sunday. The death count doubled over the weekend to 832 as reports came in after the devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake.
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PALU, Indonesia - The death toll from a powerful earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia leaped to 832 Sunday, as stunned people on the stricken island of Sulawesi struggled to find food and water and looting spread.
The new toll announced by the national disaster agency was almost double the previous figure.
Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the final number of dead could be in the "thousands" as many regions have still not been reached.
"It feels very tense," said 35-year-old mother Risa Kusuma, comforting her feverish baby boy at an evacuation center in the gutted coastal city of Palu. "Every minute an ambulance brings in bodies. Clean water is scarce. The mini markets are looted everywhere."
Indonesia’s Metro TV on Sunday broadcast footage from a coastal community in Donggala, close to the epicenter of the quake, where some waterfront homes appeared crushed but a resident said most people fled to higher ground after the quake struck.
"When it shook really hard, we all ran up into the hills," a man identified as Iswan told Metro TV.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo arrived in the region Sunday afternoon to see the devastation for himself.
In Palu city on Sunday, aid was trickling in, the Indonesian military had been deployed and search-and-rescue workers were doggedly combing the rubble for survivors -- looking for as many as 150 people at one upscale hotel alone.
"We managed to pull out a woman alive from the Hotel Roa-Roa last night," Muhammad Syaugi, head of the national search and rescue agency, told AFP. "We even heard people calling for help there yesterday."
"What we now desperately need is heavy machinery to clear the rubble. I have my staff on the ground, but it's impossible just to rely on their strength alone to clear this."
There were also concerns over the whereabouts of hundreds of people who had been preparing for a beach festival when the 7.5-magnitude quake struck Friday, sparking a tsunami that ripped apart the city's coastline.
A Facebook page was created by worried relatives who posted pictures of still-missing family members in the hopes of finding them alive.
The disaster agency said it believed about 61 foreigners were in Palu when the quake struck, with most accounted for and safe.
Three French nationals and a South Korean, who may have been staying at a flattened hotel, had not yet been accounted for, it added.
Amid the leveled trees, overturned cars, concertinaed homes and flotsam tossed up to 50 meters inland, survivors and rescuers struggled to come to grips with the scale of the disaster.
On Saturday evening, residents fashioned makeshift bamboo shelters or slept out on dusty playing fields, fearing powerful aftershocks would topple damaged homes and bring yet more carnage.
C-130 military transport aircraft with relief supplies managed to land at the main airport in Palu, which re-opened to humanitarian flights and limited commercial flights, but only to pilots able to land by sight alone.
Satellite imagery provided by regional relief teams showed the severe damage at some of the area's major sea ports, with large ships tossed on land, quays and bridges trashed and shipping containers thrown around.
Hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of those injured, with many people being treated in the open air. There were widespread power blackouts.
"We all panicked and ran out of the house" when the quake hit, said Anser Bachmid, a 39-year-old Palu resident. "People here need aid -- food, drink, clean water."
'I JUST RAN'
Dramatic video footage captured from the top floor of a parking ramp as the tsunami rolled in showed waves bringing down several buildings and inundating a large mosque.
"I just ran when I saw the waves hitting homes on the coastline," said Palu resident Rusidanto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
About 17,000 people had been evacuated, the government disaster agency said and that number was expected to soar.
"This was a terrifying double disaster," said Jan Gelfand, a Jakarta-based official at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
"The Indonesian Red Cross is racing to help survivors."
Images showed a double-arched yellow bridge had collapsed with its two metal arches twisted as cars bobbed in the water below.
A key access road had been badly damaged and was partially blocked by landslides, the disaster agency said.
DISASTER PRONE
Friday's tremor was also felt in the far south of the island in its largest city Makassar and on neighboring Kalimantan, Indonesia's portion of Borneo island.
As many as 2.4 million people could have felt the quake, the disaster agency said.
The initial quake struck as evening prayers were about to begin in the world's biggest Muslim majority country on the holiest day of the week, when mosques are especially busy.
Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth.
It lies on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", where tectonic plates collide and many of the world's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.
Earlier this year, a series of powerful quakes hit Lombok, killing more than 550 people on the holiday island and neighboring Sumbawa.
Indonesia has been hit by a string of other deadly quakes including a devastating 9.1-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra in December 2004.
That Boxing Day quake triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, including 168,000 in Indonesia.
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MAKASSAR - Indonesia was rocked by a powerful 7.5 magnitude earthquake Friday, with the national disaster agency saying that "many" buildings had collapsed in the aftermath of the huge tremor.
There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries.
"There are reports that many buildings collapsed in the earthquake," national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement.
"Residents panicked and scattered out of their homes."
Pictures supplied by the agency showed a badly damaged shopping mall in the city of Palu where at least one floor had collapsed onto the storey below.
Other pictures showed major damage to buildings, with rubble strewn about the road and large cracks running through pavement.
Search and rescue teams have been dispatched to hard-hit areas, Nugroho said.
The quake hit central Sulawesi island at a shallow depth of some 10 kilometers, the US Geological Survey said, just hours after a smaller jolt killed at least one person in the same part of the country.
The disaster agency briefly issued a tsunami warning before lifting it.
AFP phone calls to several regional hospitals went unanswered.
The latest quake was a higher magnitude than those that killed hundreds on the island of Lombok earlier this year.
Friday's tremor was centered 78 kilometers north of Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi province, but was felt in the far south of the island in its largest city Makassar and on the neighboring island of Kalimantan, Indonesia's portion of Borneo island.
The initial tremor struck as evening prayers were about to begin in the world's biggest Muslim majority country on the holiest day of the week when mosques would be especially busy.
It was followed by a series of powerful aftershocks, including one measuring 5.7 magnitude.
'Earthquake, earthquake!'
"I was about to start prayers but then I heard people shouting 'earthquake! earthquake!' so I stopped," Andi Temmaeli from Wajo, south of Palu, told AFP.
Lisa Soba Palloan, a resident of Toraja, also south of Palu, said locals felt several quakes Friday.
"The last one was quite big," she said.
"Everyone was getting out their homes, shouting in fear."
Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth.
The Southeast Asian archipelago nation lies on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", where tectonic plates collide and many of the world's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.
This summer, a series of powerful quakes hit Lombok, killing over 550 people on the holiday island and neighboring Sumbawa.
Some 1,500 people were injured and about 400,000 residents were displaced after their homes were destroyed.
Indonesia has been hit by a string of other deadly quakes including a devastating 9.1 magnitude tremor that struck off the coast of Sumatra in 2004.
That quake triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, including 168,000 in Indonesia.
The Boxing Day disaster was the world's third-biggest quake since 1900, and lifted the ocean floor in some places by 15 meters.
Indonesia's Aceh province was the hardest hit area, but the tsunami affected coastal areas as far away as Africa.
Among the country's other big earthquakes, a 6.3-magnitude quake in 2006 rocked a densely populated region of Java near the city of Yogyakarta, killing around 6,000 people and injuring 38,000.
More than 420,000 people were left homeless and some 157,000 houses were destroyed.
A year earlier, in 2005, a quake measuring 8.7 magnitude struck off the coast of Sumatra, which is particularly prone to quakes, killing 900 people and injuring 6,000.
It caused widespread destruction on the western island of Nias.
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NEW BERN, N.C.—Junia MacDaniel just wants to get home to her Chihuahuas. All 14 of them are back in the double-wide trailer MacDaniel shares with her husband in New Bern, North Carolina.
The MacDaniels are seeking shelter from the monster storm Hurricane Florence, and they decided it was best to leave their little dogs behind.
They were among 12,000 North Carolinians staying in shelters after being displaced by the slow-moving storm that is expected to bring powerful storm surges and dozens of inches of rain to the eastern part of the state.
“This has been a really large evacuation and sheltering operation, probably the largest we've done, so that has not been an easy lift. I think it’s working,” said Keith Acree of North Carolina's Department of Emergency Management.
North Carolina began feeling the effects of Florence's wind and heavy rain on Thursday afternoon but the storm was not expected to make landfall until late night or early on Friday.
Avis Miner, 57, brought her friend and five grandchildren to a shelter in Washington, about 100 miles east of Raleigh, after leaving their trailer home in Aurora. She worried that if they stayed home “we’d be blown away.”
In shelters on Thursday, people crowded on cots, inflatable mattresses and blankets on the floors and in hallways of gymnasiums, clustering in corners to talk and outside to smoke.
More than 200 people had arrived at Wilmington’s Trask Middle School by Wednesday afternoon, along with 20 dogs, nine cats and a bird. More sought safety at another shelter in the city.
“It wasn’t safe,” said David Sullivan, a 76-year-old retired tow boat captain who evacuated his downtown Wilmington apartment. “I just figured come here and be safe.”
Debbie Green, director of social services for Pamlico County, said she is always worried about people being too isolated and vulnerable to make it to a shelter and, she said, “There are always people that are not willing to leave.”
Still, the shelter she is overseeing in Grantsboro, about 130 miles east of Raleigh, was 81 percent full by noon on Thursday and Green expected that number to swell. "People will come in the middle of a storm,” she said.
MacDaniel, who has sat out previous storms, said everyone told her that Florence would be different.
“All the other storms we stayed put. But they told us this storm was the doozy,” MacDaniel said. “We have never flooded before but we didn’t really want to take no chances.”
Now, she’s counting the hours until she can return home to her Chihuahuas.
“When it clears up just a little bit, momma’s going home ... I just miss my dogs.” (Additional reporting By Ernest Scheyder in Wilmington, North Carolina Editing by Frank McGurty, Toni Reinhold)
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TOKYO - The death toll from a powerful earthquake that rattled the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido doubled to at least 16, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday, with more than half the island's 5.3 million residents still without power.
The 6.7-magnitude quake, which hit before dawn on Thursday, triggered landslides that buried houses and paralyzed Hokkaido with widespread power and transport cuts.
The death toll had been put at eight overnight but NHK cited Abe in reporting the new total soon after he held an emergency meeting early on Friday.
Another 26 people were missing, disaster management authorities said.
The island, a tourist destination about the size of Austria known for its mountains, lakes and seafood, lost all power after the quake when Hokkaido Electric Power Co shut its fossil fuel-fired power plants as a precaution.
The utility had restored power to about 1.31 million of 2.95 million customers by early Friday, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said. It could take at least a week to restore power fully, Industry Minister Hiroshige Seko has said.
The quake was the second disaster to hit Japan this week alone after a summer during which the country has been battered by deadly typhoons, flooding and a record heat wave.
Kansai International Airport has been shut since Typhoon Jebi ripped through Osaka on Tuesday, although some domestic flights operated by Japan Airlines (JAL) and ANA's low-cost carrier Peach Aviation resumed on Friday, the carriers said.
At Hokkaido's main airport, New Chitose, JAL was preparing to restart some flights from around 11:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) on Friday, a spokesman said. ANA cancelled all morning flights but would resume operations as normal in the afternoon, a spokesman said.
JR Hokkaido planned to resume bullet train operations from midday. It was also trying to resume other train services on Friday afternoon, a spokesman said.
However, manufacturers were still being affected by power outages.
Toyota Motor Corp's Tomakomai factory, which makes transmissions and other parts, said operations remained suspended indefinitely until power was restored, a spokesman said.
Toppan Printing's operations at a plant in Chitose, which makes food packages, would remain suspended until it regained power, a spokesman said.
Cultural events were also affected, with a soccer friendly between Japan and Chile scheduled for Friday in Sapporo called off.
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At least nine people were killed and about 300 injured by a magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido early Thursday, destroying houses, ripping apart roads and causing a number of massive landslides, including some that buried parts of towns.
The 3:08 a.m. quake also cut power to all 2.95 million homes and a nuclear power plant in the prefecture, causing the cancellation of flights and disrupting train services to the popular tourist destination, authorities and other sources said. As of 5 p.m., power had been restored to 340,000 households.
About 30 people are missing and more than 6,400 people took shelter at evacuation centers set up at over 500 locations, according to police, rescuers and local authorities.
About 4,900 members of the Self-Defense Forces were quickly dispatched to assist with relief operations, with the number expected to increase to 25,000, according to the Defense Ministry.
The temblor, which occurred in southern Hokkaido at a depth of about 37 kilometers, registered the highest reading of 7 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale in Atsuma and upper 6 in Abira, both southeast of Sapporo. No tsunami warning was issued.
Smaller aftershocks continued and the Japan Meteorological Agency warned that earthquakes with a similar intensity could continue in the area for about a week.
Quakes with an intensity of 7 occurred in 2016 in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, as well as in March 2011 when a huge M9.0 quake and subsequent tsunami devastated northeastern Japan.
Thursday's quake is the latest in a series of natural disasters in Japan this year, and came just days after a powerful typhoon roared through western Japan, killing more than 11 people, injuring more than 400 and forcing the temporary shutdown of Kansai International Airport, one of the country's key gateways.
A M6.1 quake also rocked Osaka Prefecture in June, killing five people and injuring more than 370.
In the Hokkaido quake, more than 20 houses were flattened in Atsuma and Abira after being struck by landslides. And in neighboring Mukawa, a man in his 80s was crushed by a chest that toppled onto him, local police reported.
Massive landslides altered the landscape of some mountain ranges in the quake-hit area. Hiroyuki Ono, a senior researcher at the Sabo and Landslide Technical Center, said that the ground in the area is loose, consisting partly of volcanic ash or eroded earth.
"It couldn't hold together after being shaken so hard. It had rained beforehand, which may have also made things worse," he said.
The idled Tomari nuclear power plant temporarily lost an external power source, forcing its operator Hokkaido Electric Power Co. to cool a spent fuel pool at its Nos. 1 to 3 reactors by an emergency power supply system, regulators said.
No abnormality has been detected in radiation levels around the plant, the Nuclear Regulation Authority said. And Tohoku Electric Power Co. confirmed no problems at the Higashidori nuclear power plant in Aomori Prefecture south of Hokkaido.
The incident brought back memories of the 2011 quake and subsequent tsunami, which knocked out both the main and emergency power supply at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and caused three reactors to melt down.
The power outage across much of Hokkaido on Thursday was caused by a systemic showdown after the Tomatoatsuma thermal power plant, which produces nearly half of the prefecture's electricity, stopped. The resulting imbalance in power supply and demand forced other thermal power plants to come to an emergency halt, according to the plant's operator.
The blackout, the largest since the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake caused one affecting some 2.6 million households, also affected around 80 hospitals, as well as telephone services and television broadcasts in Hokkaido.
Hokkaido Electric said it would take at least a week to fully restore service.
Following the quake, a fire broke out at a petrochemical complex in Muroran which was later extinguished by firefighters.
Hokkaido has experienced a number of strong earthquakes in its history, including an M8.0 quake in 2003 with an intensity of lower 6 and an M8.2 quake with an intensity of 6 in 1994.
"It messed up my entire house. I've never experienced an earthquake like this," an 87-year-old man in Atsuma said.
Yuriko Nakamura said she evacuated to the gymnasium of an elementary school in Sapporo after the quake left the floor of her home covered in shattered dishes. "I can't live like this. What am I to do?" wondered the 70-year-old, who lives alone.
New Chitose Airport, the main gateway to Hokkaido, was closed throughout the day after part of its terminal building ceiling collapsed, as well as due to a water leak and the power outage, the transport ministry said.
More than 200 flights were canceled, affecting over 40,000 passengers. Power has been restored at the airport and its operator aims to resume domestic flights on Friday, the ministry said. Hakodate and Asahikawa airports are operating.
All train services, including bullet train operations, in Hokkaido are suspended, operators said.
About 2,000 public elementary, junior high and high schools decided to close for the day, according to the education ministry and the Sapporo government.
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TOKYO - A powerful earthquake triggered a landslide that engulfed houses on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido early on Thursday, television footage showed, injuring and trapping dozens of people and cutting power to millions across Hokkaido.
A landslide along a long ridge in the rural town of Atsuma could be seen in aerial footage from public broadcaster NHK. At least 19 people were missing and 120 people were injured in Hokkaido after the magnitude 6.7 quake, it said.
There were no early reports of deaths but a man suffered cardiac arrest after falling down stairs, Japanese media reported.
Japan's Hokkaido Electric Power Co said it conducted an emergency shutdown of all its fossil fuel-fired power plants after the quake, leading to blackouts across Hokkaido.
Efforts to restore power to 2.95 million households were underway but it was not clear when supplies would be restored, a company spokesman said.
Japan's Trade and Industry Minister Hiroshige Seko said the ministry instructed Hokkaido Electric Power to restart the coal-fired Tomato-Atsuma power plant within a few hours.
Roof tiles and water covered floors at Hokkaido's main airport, New Chitose Airport, which would be closed for at least Thursday.
Kansai Airport, an important hub for companies exporting semiconductors in western Japan, remained closed due to a powerful typhoon earlier this week.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said officials hope to reopen Kansai Airport for domestic flights on Friday.
FIRE, POWER OUTAGES
The quake, which struck at 3:08 a.m. (2:08 a.m. Manila time) posed no tsunami risk, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The US Geological Survey said it struck some 68 km (42 miles) southeast of Sapporo, Hokkaido's main city.
Abe arrived at his office before 6 a.m. and told reporters his government had set up a command center to coordinate relief and rescue. Sounding haggard, Abe said saving lives was his government's top priority.
The Tomari Nuclear Power Station suffered a power outage but was cooling its fuel rods safely with emergency power, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. Operator Hokkaido Electric Power Co reported no radiation irregularities at the plant, which has been shut since shortly after a massive 2011 earthquake, Suga told a news conference.
A fire broke out at a Mitsubishi Steel Mfg Co plant in the city of Muroran after the quake but was mostly extinguished with no injuries, a company official said.
A row of houses could be seen slanting at odd angles, leaning against one another in one town, and many schools were closed, NHK said.
NHK footage showed a crumbled brick wall and broken glass in a home, and quoted police as saying some people were trapped in collapsed structures.
Soldiers were shown looking for damage on a rural road that was blocked by fallen trees.
A series of smaller shocks, including one with a magnitude of 5.4, followed the initial quake, the Meteorological Agency said. Agency official Toshiyuki Matsumori warned residents to take precautions for potential major aftershocks in coming days.
Shinkansen bullet trains were halted in some areas of Hokkaido, NHK said.
Japan is situated on the "Ring of Fire" arc of volcanoes and oceanic trenches that partly encircles the Pacific Basin and accounts for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan, struck on March 11, 2011, under the ocean off the coast of the northern city of Sendai. The quake set off a series of massive tsunami that devastated a wide swath of the Pacific coastline and killed nearly 20,000 people.
The tsunami also damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a series of explosions and meltdowns in the world's worst nuclear disaster for 25 years.
Saturday marked the 95th anniversary of the Great Kanto earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.9 and killed more than 140,000 people in the Tokyo area. Seismologists have said another such quake could strike the city at any time.
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TEHARAN - Teams of Iranian rescuers dug through rubble in a hunt for survivors Monday after a major earthquake struck the Iran-Iraq border, killing at least 421 people and injuring thousands.
The 7.3-magnitude quake rocked a border area 30 kilometeRs (20 miles) southwest of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan at around 9:20 pm on Sunday, the US Geological Survey said.
Many people would have been at home when the quake hit in Iran's western province of Kermanshah, where authorities said it killed at least 413 people and injured 6,700.
Across the border in more sparsely populated areas of Iraq, the health ministry said eight people had died and several hundred were injured.
Iraq's Red Crescent reported 9 dead and more than 400 injured.
Iranian authorities said rescue operations had been largely completed and the government declared Tuesday a national day of mourning.
As dusk approached on Monday, tens of thousands of Iranians were forced to sleep outside in the cold for a second night as authorities scrambled to provide them with aid.
Some had spent Sunday night outdoors after fleeing their homes in the mountainous cross-border region, huddling around fires at dawn as authorities sent in help.
"People's immediate needs are firstly tents, water and food," said the head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari.
"Newly constructed buildings... held up well, but the old houses built with earth were totally destroyed," he told state television during a visit to the affected region.
Hundreds of ambulances and dozens of army helicopters reportedly joined the rescue effort after Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the government and armed forces to mobilize "all their means".
Like other foreign media organisations, AFP had not received authorization to visit the scene of the disaster on Monday.
RELIEF CAMPS
Officials said they were setting up relief camps for the displaced.
Iran's emergency services chief Pir Hossein Koolivand said landslides had cut off roads to affected villages, impeding the access of rescue workers.
But by late afternoon, officials said all the roads in Kermanshah province had been re-opened, although the worst-affected town of Sar-e Pol-e Zahab remained without electricity, said state television.
Officials said 22,000 tents, 52,000 blankets and tonnes of food and water had been distributed.
The official IRNA news agency said 30 Red Crescent teams had been sent to the quake zone.
COLLAPSED WALLS
After initially pinning the quake's epicenter inside Iraq, the USGS then placed it across the border in Iran on Monday morning.
Iran's Sar-e Pol-e Zahab, home to some 85,000 people close to the border, was the worst hit, with at least 280 dead.
At dawn, buildings in the town stood disfigured, their former facades now rubble on crumpled vehicles.
In an open space away from wrecked housing blocks, men and women, some wrapped in blankets, huddled around a campfire.
The tremor also shook several western Iranian cities including Tabriz.
Some 259,000 people live in the region, according to the most recent census.
State television showed tents, blankets and food being distributed in areas struck by the temblor.
In neighboring Dalahoo County, several villages were totally destroyed, an official told Tasnim agency.
A Kermanshah official told ISNA agency that five historical monuments in the province suffered minor damage, but the UNESCO-listed Behistun inscription from the seventh century BC was not affected.
WINDOWS SHATTERED
In Iraq, the health ministry said the quake had killed seven people in the northern province of Sulaimaniyah and one in Diyala province to its south.
More than 500 people were injured in both provinces and the nearby province of Kirkuk.
Footage posted on Twitter showed panicked people fleeing a building in Sulaimaniyah as windows shattered at the moment the quake struck. Images from the nearby town of Darbandikhan showed walls and concrete structures that had collapsed.
Nizar Abdullah spent the night with neighbours sifting through the ruins of a two-storey home next door after it crumbled into concrete debris.
"There were eight people inside," the 34-year-old Iraqi Kurd said.
Some family members managed to escape, but "neighbours and rescue workers pulled out the mother and one of the children dead from the rubble".
RESIDENTS FLEE HOMES IN TURKEY
The quake, which struck at a relatively shallow depth of 23 kilometres, was felt for about 20 seconds in Baghdad, and for longer in other provinces of Iraq, AFP journalists said.
Iraqi health authorities said they treated dozens of people in the aftermath, mostly for shock.
It was also felt in southeastern Turkey, an AFP correspondent said. In the town of Diyarbakir, residents were reported to have fled their homes.
The quake struck along a 1,500-kilometre fault line between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which extends through western Iran and northeastern Iraq.
The area sees frequent seismic activity.
In 1990, a 7.4-magnitude quake in northern Iran killed 40,000 people, injured 300,000 and left half a million homeless, reducing dozens of towns and nearly 2,000 villages to rubble in just seconds.
Thirteen years later, a catastrophic quake flattened swathes of the ancient southeastern Iranian city of Bam, killing at least 31,000.
Iran has experienced at least two major quake disasters since, one in 2005 that killed more than 600 and another in 2012 that left some 300 dead.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MEXICO CITY - Rescuers toiled on Thursday to extract survivors, including Taiwanese workers, from collapsed buildings after Mexico's deadliest earthquake in 32 years, but the Navy said no children were now trapped at a school at the heart of rescue efforts.
More than 50 survivors have been plucked from disaster sites in Mexico City since Tuesday afternoon's 7.1-magnitude quake, and first responders, volunteers and spectators joined in chants of "Yes we can!"
The death toll was at least 233, revised down from 237 earlier on Thursday, according to Mexico's head of civil protection Luis Felipe Puente. In Mexico City 1,900 were injured.
As the chance of survival diminished with each passing hour, officials vowed to press on, heartened by a few success stories.
Late on Wednesday night, an eight-year-old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the Tlalpan neighborhood, nearly 36 hours after the quake, local officials said.
After more than a day of wall-to-wall television coverage of the search for a girl in the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen School in the south of the capital, the Mexican Navy changed its version of events and said all pupils were now accounted for.
"We have done a count with the school authorities and we are sure that all the children, either tragically, died, or are in hospital, or safe at home," said senior Navy official Angel Enrique Sarmiento.
Mexican television stations, led by broadcaster Televisa, had cited rescuers as saying that a schoolgirl was trapped in the rubble. An admiral in charge of the rescue effort at the school had confirmed that.
Eleven other children were rescued from the same Enrique Rebsamen School, where students are aged roughly 6 to 15. Nineteen children and six adults there were killed. The body of a woman was pulled out on Thursday morning.
The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed five nationals were trapped in a collapsed clothing factory in the Obrera neighborhood. The victims included a Taiwanese businessman, according to Carlos Liao, Taiwan's top envoy to Mexico.
Volunteers cutting through debris at the factory, which had been combed by rescue dogs, heard signs of life.
"First we heard blows, and then we established visual contact. There was a person trapped in a car," said rescue worker Amaury Perez. "We shouted, 'If you are inside the vehicle, please knock three times.' He knocked three times."
Rescue workers were joined by crews from Panama, El Salvador, the United States and Israel with others from Latin American countries on the way.
Throughout the capital, volunteers and bystanders used dogs, cameras, motion detectors and heat-seeking equipment to detect victims who may still be alive. Mechanical diggers moved large slabs of concrete.
OUTPOURING OF AID
Armed soldiers guarded abandoned buildings feared to be at the point of collapse. Some 52 buildings collapsed in Mexico City alone and more in the surrounding states.
Thousands of people have donated food, water, medicine, blankets and other basic items to help relief efforts. Companies provided free services, and restaurants delivered food to shelters where thousands of people have sought refuge after their homes were damaged.
President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has declared three days of national mourning, said, "If anything distinguishes Mexicans, it is our generosity and fraternity."
The extensive damage to many buildings, some of them relatively new, has raised questions over construction standards which were supposed to have improved after a devastating 1985 quake.
Tuesday's quake killed 102 people in Mexico City and the remainder in five surrounding states, officials said. The state of Puebla was hit hard. Governor Jose Antonio Gali said on local television that 86 churches had been damaged and more than 1,600 homes would have to be demolished.
The quake came on the anniversary of a 1985 earthquake that killed thousands and still resonates in Mexico. Annual Sept. 19 earthquake drills were being held a few hours before the nation got rocked once again.
Mexico was still recovering from another powerful quake less than two weeks ago that killed nearly 100 people in the south of the country.
Parts of Mexico City, home to some 20 million people, are built on an ancient lake bed that trembles easily in a quake.
Some residents and volunteers voiced anger that emergency services and military were slow to arrive to poorer southern neighborhoods of the city, and that wealthier districts appeared prioritized.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Hurricane Maria rampaged across Puerto Rico
on Wednesday as the strongest storm to hit the U.S. territory in nearly
90 years, causing major flooding, damaging homes and knocking out power
to the whole island after killing at least nine people in the Caribbean.
Maria, the second major hurricane to roar through the Caribbean this month, was carrying winds of up to 155 miles per hour (250 kph), when it made landfall near Yabucoa, on the southeast of the island of 3.4 million people.
It ripped the roofs off buildings and turned low-lying streets into rushing rivers of debris knocked down by winds.
Its winds downed trees and damaged homes and buildings, including several hospitals, local media reported. News pictures showed whole blocks flooded in the Hato Rey neighborhood of the capital, San Juan.
Streets in San Juan's old town were left strewn with debris, from broken balconies and downed power lines to air conditioning units, shattered lamp posts, uprooted trees and dead birds.
"When we are able to go outside, we are going to find our island destroyed," Abner Gomez, the director of the island's emergency management agency, known by its Spanish language acronym AEMEAD, was quoted as saying by El Nuevo Dia newspaper. "It's a system that has destroyed everything in its path."
Maria was producing widespread and dangerous flooding across the island, the National Weather Service said
Electricity was believed to be out across the island, said Pedro Cerame, a spokesman for Governor Ricardo Rossello.
Authorities had not yet been able to assess the extent of the damage, he said.
Thousands of people had sought safety in shelters.
"God is with us; we are stronger than any hurricane," Rossello said on Twitter. "Together we will rise again."
By 2 p.m. ET (1800 GMT), Maria's center was heading away and it was located just north of the island, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. As expected when hurricanes move over hilly or mountainous ground, it had lost strength. But with top winds of 115 mph (185 kph), it was still a Category 3 on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale, a major hurricane.
It was forecast to maintain strength as it passed the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic later on Wednesday.
At one point a rare Category 5 storm, Maria killed at least seven people on the island of Dominica, government officials said, and two people in the French territory of Guadeloupe as it barreled through the Caribbean. It also caused widespread damage on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Hurricane Irma, which ranked as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, also left a trail of destruction in several Caribbean islands and Florida this month, killing at least 84 people in the Caribbean and the U.S. mainland.
FRAGILE HOMES
Maria was expected to dump as much as 25 inches (66 cm) of rain on parts of Puerto Rico, the NHC said. Storm surges, when hurricanes push ocean water dangerously over normal levels, could be up to 9 feet (2.7 meters.)
Many homes and businesses across Puerto Rico have wooden or tin roofs, cheaper building materials that also keep homes cooler in the balmy Caribbean climate, but no match for storms of the intensity of Maria.
"This might be a new, permanent part of our lives," said Ramon Claudio Ortiz, 71, a retired lawyer. "We're going to have to revisit our building codes."
The Weather Undergound website said Maria, classified as a Category 4 hurricane when it landed, was the second strongest hurricane ever recorded to hit Puerto Rico, behind only the 1928 San Felipe Segundo hurricane, which killed more than 300 people.
Maria brought its destruction at a time when Puerto Rico is struggling financially, grappling with the largest municipal debt crisis in U.S. history, with both its government and the public utility having filed for bankruptcy protection amid disputes with creditors.
Even though Irma grazed north of Puerto Rico and did not hit the island directly, it knocked out power for 70 percent of the island, and killed at least three people.
DOMINICA 'IN A DAZE'
Before hitting Puerto Rico, Maria ripped off roofs and downed trees as it passed west of St. Croix, home to about half of the U.S. Virgin Islands' 103,000 residents.
Some 65 to 70 percent of the buildings on St. Croix were damaged by the storm, said Holland Redfield, who served six terms in the U.S. Virgin Islands senate.
"There were a lot of homes that had lost their roofs. It was a sad sight," Redfield said in a phone interview, describing viewing the island. "I'm in a very densely populated area now and I see a tremendous amount of confusion. A lot of trees are down."
In Guadeloupe, at least two people were killed, according to France's minister for overseas territories. Many roads were blocked and 40 percent of the population was without power, the overseas territories ministry said in a statement.
The island of Dominica, with a population of about 73,000, was devastated by Maria earlier in the week. Hartley Henry, principal adviser to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that "the country is in a daze."
Maria was expected to move near the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeastern Bahamas on Thursday night and Friday, the NHC said. So far, it looked unlikely to threaten the continental United States.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
* Irma downgraded to tropical storm as it heads northwest
* About 7.3 million in Florida, other states without power
* 39 killed in Caribbean, one in U.S.
FLORIDA CITY/MARCO ISLAND, Florida - Storm-shocked Floridians returned to their shattered homes on Monday as the remnants of once-powerful Hurricane Irma pushed inland, leaving well over half of residents without power and flooding cities in the state's northeastern corner.
Downgraded to a tropical storm early on Monday, Irma once ranked as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record days before barreling into the Florida Keys on Sunday and plowing northward along the Gulf Coast to wreak havoc across a wide swath of the state.
Especially hard hit was the resort archipelago of the Keys, extending into the Gulf of Mexico from the tip of Florida's peninsula and connected to the mainland by a single, narrow highway, Governor Rick Scott told a news conference on Monday.
"There's devastation," he said, adding that virtually every mobile-home park on the island chain was left upended. "It's horrible what we saw."
In Miami, which escaped the worst of Irma's winds but experienced heavy flooding, residents in the city's Little Haiti neighborhood returned to the wreckage of trailer homes that were shredded by the storm.
"I wanted to cry, but this is what it is, this is life," Melida
Hernandez, 67, who had ridden out the storm at a nearby church, said as
she gazed at the ruins of her dwelling, split in two by a fallen tree.
Flooding was reported on Monday in northeastern Florida, including
Jacksonville, where police were rescuing residents from waist-deep
water.
"Stay inside. Go up. Not out," Jacksonville's website warned
residents. "There is flooding throughout the city." The city also warned
residents to be wary of snakes and alligators driven into the
floodwaters.
EVACUEES URGED TO STAY PUT
Still, the scope of Florida's damage paled in comparison with the utter devastation left by Irma as a rare Category 5 hurricane in parts of the Caribbean, where the storm killed nearly 40 people - at least 10 of them in Cuba - before turning its fury on Florida.
The storm claimed its first known U.S. fatality over the weekend in the Keys - a man found dead in a pickup truck that had crashed into a tree in high winds, but there was no immediate word on further casualties.
The Keys were largely evacuated before the storm hit, and police established a checkpoint on Monday to keep residents from returning while authorities work to restore power, water, fuel supplies and medical service.
No timetable for reopening the Keys was given, but Miami-Dade County police detective Alvaro Zabeleta, speaking for local authorities, said the message for evacuees was: "Today, for sure, it's not happening."
Some 6.5 million people, about one-third of Florida's population, had been ordered from their homes ahead of Irma's arrival, and more than 200,000 people sought refuge in about 700 shelters, according to state data.
Scott urged evacuees all over the state to stay put for now rather than rush home, saying downed power lines, debris and other hazards abounded. "Don't put any more lives at risk," he said.
He noted, however, that damage to Florida's west coast, which bore the brunt of the storm after Irma left the Keys, was less severe than had been feared.
WITHOUT POWER
One of the biggest lingering problems was widespread power outages, with utilities reporting 7.3 million homes and businesses without electricity in Florida and neighboring states. They said it could take weeks to fully restore service.
Scott said 65 percent of Florida was without power.
Travel into and out of the state likewise remained stymied. Miami International Airport, one of the busiest in the country, halted passenger flights through at least Monday.
Police in Miami-Dade County said they had made 29 arrests for looting and burglary. Fort Lauderdale police said they had arrested 19 people for looting.
With sustained winds of up to 60 miles per hour (100 kph), Irma had crossed into Georgia by midday, posing a threat of torrential rains and flooding there and other states in the U.S. Southeast.
Some residents who fled the Keys before Irma roared ashore with winds up to 130 mph (209 kph) grew angry as authorities barred them from returning to their homes on Monday.
A few dozen people argued with police who turned them away from the first of a series of bridges leading to the island chain.
"I would expect that the Keys are not fit for re-entry for regular citizenry for weeks," Tom Bossert, a homeland security advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, told a White House news briefing.
BILLIONS IN DAMAGE
Irma's arrival in Florida came about two weeks after Hurricane Harvey claimed about 60 lives and caused property damage estimates as high as $180 billion after pummeling the Gulf Coasts of Texas and Louisiana with heavy rains and severe flooding.
Insured property losses in Florida from Irma are expected to run from $20 billion to $40 billion, catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimated.
That tally, lower than earlier forecasts of up to $50 billion in insured losses, helped spur a relief rally on Wall Street as fears eased that Irma would cut into U.S. economic growth.
As shelters began to empty on Monday, some 7,000 people filed out of Germain Arena in Estero, south of Fort Myers. The crowd included Don Sciarretta, who rode out the storm with his 90-year-old friend, Elsie Johnston, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
Sciarretta, 73, spent two days without sleep, holding up a slumped-over Johnston and making sure she did not fall out of her chair. He relied on other people in the shelter to bring the pair food, often after waiting in hours-long lines.
"For the next storm, I'll go somewhere on my own like a hotel or a friend's house," Sciarretta said. "I'm not going through this again."
(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in Orlando, Fla., Bernie Woodall, Ben Gruber and Zachary Fagenson in Miami, Letitia Stein in Detroit, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, N.C., Doina Chiacu and Jeff Mason in Washington, Scott DiSavino in New York and Marc Frank in Havana; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Paul Simao and Peter Cooney)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
More than 1.4 million homes and businesses in south Florida were without power from Hurricane Irma on Sunday, the state's largest utility said, and repairs to its system will take weeks, threatening to leave millions in the dark.
Much of the state has not yet felt the full brunt of the storm as Irma barreled across the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and headed for the state's southwest coast with maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometers per hour, making it a Category 4 storm, the second worst on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
In all about 2 million people and businesses had lost power. At 11:45 a.m. EDT, about 1.4 million were without power while about 300,000 had power restored, FPL said. Large utilities that serve other parts of the state saw only seeing scattered outages.
"We will have to rebuild part of our system, particularly in the western part of the state. That restoration process will be measured in weeks, not days," said FPL spokesman Rob Gould at a news conference.
On Friday, the utility warned Irma could impact around 4.1 million customers, but that was before the storm track shifted away from the eastern side of the state where FPL's customers are concentrated in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Last October, Hurricane Matthew knocked out 1.2 million FPL customers as it skirted Florida's east coast without making landfall. Matthew did not come on shore and damage infrastructure, and it took the utility about two days to restore power.
FPL has warned customers to prepare for outages that could last weeks if Irma requires the utility to rebuild parts of its service territory.
FPL decided to shut only one of the two reactors at its Turkey Point nuclear plant on Saturday because the storm track shifted, and plans to leave both reactors at the St. Lucie plant in service because hurricane force winds are no longer expected to hit the sites. On Sunday, Gould said its nuclear plants were safe.
FPL had said on Friday it planned to shut both units at Turkey Point sometime on Saturday about 24 hours before hurricane force winds reached the plant.
St. Lucie is located on a barrier island on the state's east coast, about 120 miles (193 km) north of Miami, while Turkey Point is about 30 miles south of Miami.
FPL is a unit of Florida energy company NextEra Energy Inc.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MIAMI/FORT MYERS, Florida -- Millions of people huddled in shelters or battened-down homes in Florida on Sunday morning as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, hit the state with 210-kph winds.
The National Hurricane Center forecast potentially deadly storm surges -- water driven ashore by the winds -- of up to 15 feet along some parts of the coast. As the storm made landfall on the Florida Keys archipelago off the tip of southern Florida, torrential rains and lashing winds knocked out power to nearly 800,000 homes and businesses on the mainland, according to utilities.
"Pray for us," Florida Governor Rick Scott said in an ABC News interview as his state braced for the massive storm, which has already left a trail of destruction through the Caribbean.
Irma, which prompted one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history, is expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the third-most-populous U.S. state, a major tourism hub, with an economy comprising about 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
Irma was a Category 4 hurricane raging in the lower Florida Keys as of 9 a.m. EDT, on a path that will take it up Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast near population centers including Tampa and St. Petersburg, the NHC reported. Forecasters also warned tornadoes could form in large portions of the state.
Irma, which killed at least 22 people as it tore through Caribbean islands toward Florida, has already claimed at least one life in the state. Emergency responders in the Florida Keys said they pulled a man's body from his pickup truck, which had crashed into a tree in high winds.
But officials say it is the water and not the winds that people should fear most.
"Storm surge has the highest potential to kill the most amount of people and to cause the most amount of damage," Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told "Fox News Sunday."
The time to evacuate the Keys had passed, he said, "It's too late for folks in Monroe County, the Florida Keys. Maximum radius winds and the eye are moving over as we speak."
STORM BABY
One woman in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood delivered her own baby, with medical personnel coaching her on the phone because emergency responders were not able to reach her, the city of Miami said on Twitter. The two are now at the hospital, it said.
Ahead of the storm, officials in Florida had ordered a total of 6.3 million people, or about a third of the state's population, to evacuate.
But some state residents planned to ride out the storm in their homes. Midway up the state's Gulf Coast in Clearwater, Sarah Griffin said she planned to hunker down in a closet in her boarded-up concrete house.
"You've just got to have plenty of beer, Captain Morgan, vodka, (and) you'll get through," said Griffin, 52.
The NHC has put out a hurricane warning and a tropical storm warning stretching through almost all of Florida into Georgia and South Carolina, home to more than 20 million people.
Irma comes just days after Hurricane Harvey dumped record-setting rain in Texas, causing unprecedented flooding, killing at least 60 people and leaving an estimated $180 billion in property damage in its wake. Almost three months remain in the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through November.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump spoke on Friday with French
President Emmanuel Macron to extend his condolences on the devastation
to the French territories of St. Barthelemy and St. Martin due to
Hurricane Irma, and to offer U.S. support to the French government, the
White House said in a statement.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
TOKYO - An avalanche Monday killed seven Japanese high school students and a teacher on a mountain-climbing outing, and injured 40 more.
More than 100 troops were deployed in a major rescue mission after the avalanche hit ski slopes in Tochigi prefecture north of Tokyo. Television footage showed rescuers climbing the mountainside as ambulances stood by.
A total of 52 students and 11 teachers from seven high schools were on a three-day mountaineering expedition when disaster struck.
A warning had been issued for heavy snow and possible avalanches from Sunday until Monday in the area, with the local weather agency forecasting snowfall of some 30 centimeters (about 12 inches).
In the latest update seven students and one teacher, mostly from Otawara High School in Tochigi, were found with no vital signs, an official with a prefectural disaster task force told AFP.
In Japan, deaths in such circumstances are not announced officially until doctors can confirm them.
Officials earlier said eight students had no vital signs.
Some 40 people have been injured, including two students in serious condition, the prefectural official said.
"All the people have been carried down from the mountain and they are now being transported to hospital," he told AFP.
The avalanche struck in the town of Nasu 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Tokyo on the final day of the excursion, Tochigi authorities said, adding that soldiers were brought in at the request of the prefecture's governor.
Local media cited experts as saying it was likely a surface avalanche, caused by a heavy snowfall accumulating on a previous deposit of slippery snow.
"This (outing) is an annual event and we never had a major accident before," one of the teachers told Jiji Press. "I am really shocked."
The ski resort had been closed for the season, according to the operator's website, with the lift stopped and no skiers at the site.
But some of its facilities were made available for the high school mountaineering trip organised by local physical education authorities.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
