“This was an extremely rare case,” said Akihiko Mayumi, the power company’s president, at a news conference. “We thought the risk of complete power failure was low.” By restarting more oil- and coal-powered plants, the company will probably be able to restore power to most households on Saturday, the government said. A Hokkaido Electric spokesman said it would be difficult to completely restore power until repairs were made at the damaged coal-fired plant—something that company officials earlier said could take a week. Still, some experts questioned whether the lengthy outage could have been prevented with better planning. Footage shows the damage caused by a strong earthquake that struck the island of Hokkaido on Thursday, with rescuers racing to find survivors, just days after the country was battered by its worst typhoon in 25 years. Photo: […]