Death toll rises in Japan earthquake, hope of finding survivors fades
‘We’ve heard there are people still stuck under the mud, so we’ve been working around the clock but it’s been difficult to rescue them’
Tokyo — Japanese rescue workers with bulldozers and sniffer dogs scrabbled through the mud Friday to find survivors from a landslide that buried houses after a powerful quake. The death toll rose to 18, with at least 22 people still unaccounted for in the small northern countryside town of Atsuma, where a cluster of dwellings were wrecked when a hillside collapsed with the force of the 6.6-magnitude quake. "We’ve heard there are people still stuck under the mud, so we’ve been working around the clock but it’s been difficult to rescue them," a Self-Defence Forces serviceman in Atsuma told public broadcaster NHK. "We will take measures to find them quickly." An elderly woman in Atsuma told NHK: "My relative is still buried under the mud and has not been found yet, so I couldn’t sleep at all last night. There were also several aftershocks so it was a restless night." About 1.6-million households in the sparsely populated northern island of Hokkaido were still without power after the qu...
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