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Nine found dead in Japan elderly home after typhoon

31 August 2016 05:09 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Nine people were found dead inside a home for elderly people in northern Japan, police said on Wednesday, after a powerful typhoon tore through the region the previous day, APA reports quoting the Telegraph.

"We are trying to confirm the identities of these bodies," Iwate prefectural police Shuko Sakamoto told AFP, confirming that nine corpses were found inside the care home in the town of Iwaizumi which suffered flooding.

Typhoon Lionrock slammed into northern Japan on Tuesday evening, hitting an area stillrecovering from the 2011 tsunami.

Japan's ministry of land, infrastructure and tourism, said on Wednesday that the embankments of two rivers gave way before dawn on the northern island of Hokkaido bringing flooding.

Authorities in the town of Minami-furano are reporting many people trapped in houses and shelters by flooding from the Sorachi river, Japanese broadcaster NHK said.

The typhoon made landfall near the city of Ofunato, 500km (310 miles) northeast of Tokyo. It's the first time a typhoon has made landfall in the northern region since 1951, when the Japan Meteorological Agency started keeping records.

More than 170,000 people were subject to evacuation, including 38,000 in Ofunato, according to the fire and disaster management agency. More than 10,000 homes in the northern region were without electricity, with power lines damaged from the winds.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami left more than 18,000 people dead in the wide swaths of Japan's northern coast, including 340 in Ofunato.

At the Fukushima nuclear power plant, decimated by the 2011 disaster, some outdoor decommissioning work was suspended as a precaution.