Massive fire in southwest Japan mostly contained, uninhabited still burning
A massive fire raging for a third day in the southwestern Japan prefecture was brought under control, except on an uninhabited island it leaped to, the city of Oita said Thursday, after the disaster left one person dead and about 170 buildings destroyed, Kyodo reports.
Local firefighters and the Self-Defense Forces worked to extinguish the blaze, with an SDF helicopter dropping water Thursday morning. The fire has consumed around 48,900 square meters in the Saganoseki port district of Oita since it was first reported to police on Tuesday afternoon.
Oita Gov. Kiichiro Sato told a disaster response meeting he hopes the fire will be contained by the end of the day, while instructing officials to provide support to evacuees.
According to local authorities, the fire had spread beyond the Saganoseki area into nearby forested areas and to an uninhabited island about 1.4 kilometers away.
The blaze follows a fire in Ofunato in Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan, in February that consumed around 3,370 hectares of the city and took 40 days to extinguish.
The following month, strong winds intensified fires in Ehime and Okayama prefectures in western Japan, damaging buildings and burning a total of 1,000 hectares. It took around a week for the respective local government heads to declare the fires contained.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported a human error was likely to blame for a passenger ferry's running aground off the southwestern coast this week, the Coast Guard said Thursday, after all 267 people aboard were safely rescued.
