Tokyo, March 22 (DPA) Rolling blackouts affecting 10 million homes restarted Tuesday in Japan following a three-day break as the toll rose and some cities chose to bury their dead after crematoria ran out of fuel, media reports said.
The outages started around 9.20 a.m. (0020 GMT) and were expected to last until 10 p.m., the Kyodo News agency reported.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that demand would outstrip capacity as the working week started following a public holiday Monday. Electricity supplies were affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which put some nuclear power stations out of action.
A shortage of fuel affected efforts to dispose of bodies, forcing some crematoria – the usual method in Japan – to stop work.
The government in Higashimatsushima city in Miyagi prefecture said it had bought land to bury up to 1,000 people. City Mayor Hideo Abe said the burials were a temporary solution and the bodies would be dug up and cremated within two years.
Many other towns and cities in Miyagi prefecture, including the capital Sendai, were reportedly planning to bury bodies.
Northeast Japan was still suffering from cold weather. Iwate prefecture capital Morioka saw temperatures as low as minus 2.8 degrees Celsius and Miyagi’s capital Sendai saw minus 3.1 degrees Celsius.
Total deaths in the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country March 11 stood at 9,079 at 12 p.m. (0300 GMT), the National Police Agency said Tuesday.
Around 310,000 people were still living in shelters and 12,645 people were registered as missing, police said.
‘Until now, we’ve asked (relief workers) to prioritize the rescue of affected people. We now want them to place priority on assisting people who are living in the shelters,’ Miyagi prefecture governor Yoshihiro Murai said in the prefecture’s capital Sendai.
The government of Iwate prefecture said Monday that access had been restored to all its communities.
Following reports that some guesthouses had turned away people fleeing the nuclear disaster in Fukushima prefecture due to fears about radiation, the Health Ministry told prefectures that they must monitor hotels to prevent this.
Not all relief efforts were running smoothly.
In Sendai, refugees housed in a school have been unable to eat microwave food due to a lack of power and were still waiting for underwear to be supplied, local officials said.
