Millions of quake-hit Japanese without food, water, power

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SENDAI, (Japan), Mar14 (AFP): Millions of Japanese people were without food, water or power Monday and hundreds of thousands more homeless after a quake and tsunami left the economic superpower battling third-world conditions. Aid workers and search teams from across the world joined 100,000 Japanese soldiers in a massive relief push as the rattled country suffered a wave of major aftershocks and fresh tsunami scare, while temperatures plummeted. Store shelves and petrol stations emptied across the country as panic buying took hold, while 2.6 million houses were without electricity and 3.2 million people were running out of gas supplies, according to the United Nations. Queues snaked across hard-hit Sendai city as people waited patiently to stock up on necessities. Lines even stretched from phone boxes, with mobile signals patchy and erratic in the disaster zone. At one co-op supermarket, cheerful staff manned stalls in the carpark carefully allocating food. Customers were allowed to buy up to two grapefruits, two oranges, five bags of crisps and chocolate, and up to two tins of tuna. Ravaged Ishinomaki, a town of about 165,000, is without power or communications and aid supplies have faltered due to transport damage. Half of the city is estimated to have been engulfed by the tsunami. "First of all, we have no drinking water," mayor Hiroshi Kameyama told public broadcaster NHK. "We also have neither food nor information." Asia-Pacific Red Cross spokesman Patrick Fuller, working in Ishinomaki, said it was a "desperate race against the clock to save those who may be trapped and wounded beneath colossal mounds of debris". "At the Red Cross hospital, no space is left unused. Exhausted Red Cross medics sleep side by side with the wounded," Fuller said on a Red Cross blog. "And still droves of injured people in need of medical help arrive. The wounded arrive on foot, by helicopter or carried by their fellow citizens."