An explosion at a spa facility in the Shibuya district of downtown Tokyo on Tuesday afternoon left four women injured, police said.

Officers from Shibuya Police Station were investigating Shiespa, a facility exclusively for women, over the cause of the blast.

The facility is located in an up-market residential district of Shibuya-ku.

Captain Japan wrote:Their Web page is too overloaded now for me to figure out where the annex is located. Anyone know?

Captain Japan wrote:The Shiespa page is here.

Mulboyne wrote:

omae mona wrote:Miraculously, the 47 news helicopters circling the area for 5 hours did not crash into each other, preventing further fatalities.

GomiGirl wrote:Omae is always a funny bugger!!

baka tono wrote:Randomly exploding onsen, possibly due to neglect sheesh whats next killer elevators and roller coasters? Oh wait...

(Kyodo) _ The Tokyo metropolitan government is set to start checking safety management at 144 spa facilities under its jurisdiction Wednesday following Tuesday's explosion at a women-only spa facility in Shibuya Ward, leaving three women dead and eight other people injured.

The metro government plans to check if the spa facilities are equipped with a gas separator -- a device that separates natural gas from underground water -- because it is suspected that natural gas, which gushes upward in piping up hot water from 1,500 meters underground, permeated the annex building and caught fire somehow, officials said late Tuesday.

It plans to alert facility operators to ventilate the building with fans, windows and doors to exhaust the gas.

The metro government also plans to check whether the facilities are equipped with gas detectors. It will have the operators check the device if they already have one and ask them to install one if they do not.

It plans to gather information at the site of the explosion and at the company that operates the spa, which was popular among women since its launch in January last year for its relaxation equipment.

The annex of a spa facility in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward destroyed in an explosion Tuesday that killed three female workers was not equipped with a gas detector, police found Wednesday. A subcontractor in charge of maintenance said its workers were never told to check the gas levels. The annex pumped up hot spring water from 1,500 meters underground and supplied it to the nearby nine-story Shibuya Shoto Onsen Shiespa facility. The Metropolitan Police Department and the Tokyo Fire Department said the system used in the annex separated natural gas from the hot spring water. Normally, the natural gas is released via a ventilator. Police suspect the system failed, resulting in the natural gas accumulating inside the annex...more...

Blah Pete wrote:This place should not have been built in a residential area.

dimwit wrote:Residental zoning? WOT's that? Everyone knows that zoning is determined by a dart board. Hit the target determine your neighbor.

As far as I can tell it works something like this:

1-4 house, 5 pachiko parlor, 6 kindergarten, 7 Lawsons, 8 industrial waste dump/garbage incinerator, 9-10 tambo, 11-12 Karaoke box/bar 13 car dealership, 14 low rise apartment 15-16 commercial strip 17 cement factory
18 parking lot 19 prefabricated office building 20 local community hall.
Miss the dart board and you get a sewage canal/drainage ditch.

IkemenTommy wrote:You left out concrete:rolleyes:

dimwit wrote:Why is that so surprising? You are in Tokyo. Tokyo is a sedimentary plain. You have to dig down deep to get anywhere near the bedrock.

The explosion at an onsen spa facility in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward that killed three people Tuesday underscored two kinds of danger in creating natural hot springs in the middle of urban areas. The number of hot springs in cities has continued to rise in recent years in response to demands for a quick and easy way to relieve stress. The number of such facilities in Tokyo has increased by about 70 percent since the mid-1990s to around 150.

One danger is that unlike hot springs that have existed for a long time near volcanoes, developers must dig deep into the ground to reach a source in urban areas.

Technically, digging more than 1,000 meters into the ground, as was the case with the facility of Shibuya Shoto Onsen Shiespa where the explosion occurred, is not very difficult thanks to advanced boring machines and pumps.

But the deeper one digs for spring water, the more unwanted substances one finds. The unwanted substances are natural gases, such as methane....more...

A geological survey company warned of a possible natural gas explosion if hot water was pumped up from the spring source indoors in a report about 10 months before the opening of the Shiespa spa facility in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, where an explosion killed three people on June 19, it has been learned.

According to sources, the Metropolitan Police Department's Shibuya Police Station has discovered the geological survey company, commissioned to analyze the natural gas emissions from the hot spring source, submitted a report in March 2005 to Unimatrealestate Co. in Minato Ward, Tokyo, that owns the spa facility and the land it sits on.

Based on the report, the police are investigating whether Unimatrealestate and Unimat Beauty and Spa Inc., the operator of the spa facility, failed to implement safety measures although they had recognized the possibility of a gas explosion...more...