Police: 10,000 likely dead in one Japan region

Millions are without drinking water, electricity or adequate food; prime minister says crisis is worst since World War II

The death toll in Japan's earthquake and tsunami will likely exceed 10,000 in one state alone, an official said Sunday, as millions of survivors were left without drinking water, electricity and proper food along the pulverised northeastern coast.

"This is Japan’s most severe crisis since the war ended 65 years ago,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan told reporters.

Kan said in a television address that the nation’s future would be decided by the choices made by each person and urged everyone to join in their determination to rebuild the nation.

At least 1.4 million households had gone without water since the quake struck and some 2.5 million households were without electricity.

Large areas of the countryside were surrounded by water and unreachable. Fuel stations were closed and people were running out of gasoline for their cars.

According to officials, more than 1,400 people were killed — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and more than 1,000 were missing in the disasters. Another 1,700 were injured.

However, police said the death toll was likely far higher in the prefecture of Miyagi alone.

Miyagi police spokesman Go Sugawara said Sunday that the prefecture’s police chief told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths in the prefecture was more than 10,000. Miyagi was one of the areas worst affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

Adding to the country’s woes, there were fears that a second nuclear reactor at the Dai-ichi power plant would explode Sunday and problems with three reactors at another power plant.

On Saturday, Japan’s nuclear safety agency reported that radioactive cesium and iodine were detected near the Dai-ichi power plant after one of its reactor exploded. Authorities said the blast did not damage the containment structure surrounding the reactor.

The detection of the materials, which are created during atomic fission, prompted the company to acknowledge that the reactor’s fuel had partially melted, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported.

Twenty-two people have been contaminated by radiation.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency said it had upgraded the magnitude of Friday’s catastrophic earthquake to 9.0. The agency earlier measured it at 8.8. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at 8.9.

The quake was already the biggest to hit Japan since record-keeping began in the late 1800s and one of the biggest ever recorded in the world.

Aerial footage from the hardest-hit areas showed buildings and trains strewn like children’s toys after powerful walls of seawater swamped areas around the worst-hit city of Sendai, about 100 miles from the earthquake’s epicentre.

Japan’s government has ordered 100,000 troops to join the rescue and recovery effort.

Teams searched for the missing along hundreds of miles of the coast. Thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centres that were cut off from rescuers and aid.

Public broadcaster NHK said around 380,000 people had been evacuated to emergency shelters, many of them without power.

In Iwanuma, not far from Sendai, nurses and doctors were rescued Saturday after spelling S.O.S. on the rooftop of a partially submerged hospital, one of many desperate scenes. In cities and towns across the northeast, worried relatives checked information boards on survivors at evacuation centres.

Helicopters also plucked survivors from an elementary school in Sendai.