OITA, Japan – Oita Gov. Kiichiro Sato said Thursday he hopes a massive fire raging for a third day in the southwestern Japan prefecture, which has left one person dead and over 170 buildings destroyed, will be contained by the end of the day.
Local firefighters and the Self-Defense Forces continued efforts to extinguish the blaze, with an SDF helicopter dropping water Thursday morning. The fire has consumed around 48,900 square meters in the Saganoseki port district of the city of Oita since it was first reported to police on Tuesday afternoon.
“I hope for continued all-out efforts to quench the fire with the aim to contain it within Thursday,” Sato told a disaster response meeting, while instructing officials to provide support to evacuees.
According to local authorities, the fire had spread beyond the Saganoseki area to nearby forested areas and an uninhabited island around 1.4 kilometers away.
The blaze follows a fire in Ofunato in Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan, in February that consumed around 3,370 hectares of the city and took 40 days to extinguish.
The following month, strong winds intensified fires in Ehime and Okayama prefectures in western Japan, damaging buildings and burning a total of 1,000 hectares. It took around a week for the respective local government heads to declare the fires contained.
AloJapan.com