NEC restarts factory after earthquake

TOKYO – NEC Electronics Inc. restarted production at its Yamagata, Japan, factory on Monday evening after a series of strong earthquakes over the weekend halted manufacturing. However, two factories near the epicenter of the quakes remain off-line and the companies that operate them have no estimate for when they will be back online.

The earthquakes occurred in Niigata prefecture, about 250 kilometers northwest of Tokyo.

The NEC Electronics factory is a major production center for the company and houses several manufacturing lines. Production stopped Saturday evening when the first earthquake struck at 5:56 p.m. local time. The 6.8 magnitude trembler was followed within the next two hours by 10 strong quakes, keeping production off-line until the machinery was checked for damage on Sunday.

Production resumed on Sunday but stopped early on Monday when another strong earthquake shook the area, before resuming again on Monday evening, said Sophie Yamamoto, a company spokeswoman.

Two factories in Ojiya, the city nearest to the epicenter of the quakes, were still off-line as of Tuesday afternoon.

Engineers from Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. had yet to enter its semiconductor factory, which produces system LSI chips for some of the company’s audio-visual products, a spokesman for the company said.

A plant operated by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. that produces combination copy and fax machines is also closed.

“The whole area is blacked out and there is no social infrastructure,” said Wilson Solano, a spokesman for the Osaka company.

As of Tuesday evening the death toll from the earthquakes had risen to 31 and the number of people in evacuation shelters stood at around 100,000, according to Japanese public broadcaster Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK). Two relatively strong aftershocks hit the area earlier in the day.