Tokyo, Oct. 16 (Jiji Press)–The Japan Meteorological Agency on Friday canceled an emergency earthquake warning after erroneously estimating that a magnitude-9.9 earthquake had occurred in the Chishima Islands off the northernmost Japan prefecture of Hokkaido the same day. The agency issued the erroneous warning at 12:40 p.m., predicting that Hokkaido and the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan would be hit by shaking of up to 7, the highest level of Japan’s seismic intensity scale. It retracted the warning at 12:48 p.m. An actual earthquake, which occurred near the Kamchatka Peninsula, had a magnitude of 6.9 and produced a seismic intensity of 1 in the city of Hakodate in Hokkaido. “We deeply apologize for causing great inconvenience,” Ayataka Ebita, director of the agency’s Earthquake and Tsunami Observation Division, told a news conference. He said that no external cyberattack has been confirmed and that it is highly likely that there was a problem with the processing of computer software. The largest earthquake in recorded history is one with a magnitude of 9.5 in Chile in 1960. Ebita said the agency is investigating the cause of the erroneous warning, including why the system produced the highly unlikely magnitude reading of 9.9. Hokkaido Railway Co., or JR Hokkaido, temporarily suspended train operations for some of its local lines following the latest warning. On Aug. 8, 2013, when an earthquake with a magnitude of 2.3 occurred in the northern part of Wakayama Prefecture, western Japan, the agency misidentified that a magnitude-7.8 earthquake had occurred in a nearby prefecture of Nara. It issued a warning that shaking with maximum seismic intensity levels ranging from lower 6 to 7 would hit Nara and a neighboring prefecture of Osaka, but canceled it later. The false warning was traced to a malfunction involving an underwater seismometer off the coast of nearby Mie Prefecture shortly after the Wakayama earthquake. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
