Death toll climbs to 18 as rescue efforts continue after Kumamoto earthquake

Rescue teams, including Japan's Self-Defense Forces and volunteers from Taiwan, spent Wednesday combing a badly damaged Aeon Mall and collapsed houses in the Kumamoto region of Kyushu after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the area a day earlier. The disaster has claimed at least 18 lives, including a Vietnamese technical intern killed when a crane fell at a factory, and injured more than 60 people, six of them seriously, according to the prefectural government.

The Aeon Mall in Kashima city, where thousands of shoppers were present at the time of the tremor, suffered a second-floor collapse and a gas explosion that shook the site as strongly as the quake itself. Aeon President Akio Yoshida said four deaths were confirmed at the mall and three people remained missing. > "We take it seriously that an explosion happened and precious lives were lost," Yoshida told reporters.

In the nearby town of Yatsushiro, a chimney collapse at a Nippon Paper Industries plant killed five workers and left four others possibly trapped. The prefectural disaster team reported that seven people were rescued from the debris.

Utility outages affected nearly 35,000 homes without electricity and about 15,000 without water. More than 8,800 residents have taken shelter in over 400 evacuation centers, where authorities are adding power supplies for air conditioning amid high temperatures.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the national government was preparing food and other necessities for the hardest-hit areas and expressed condolences to victims' families. > "There are people who are still waiting to be rescued, and it is a race against time. We will go all out to find and rescue as many people as we can."

Transportation disruptions included the suspension of bullet-train services, while Aso Kumamoto Airport resumed limited operations with some airlines canceling flights as a precaution.