SHIROMARU (AFP) – Rescuers and residents sifted through rubble yesterday as their focus turned to recovering bodies and cleaning up rather than finding survivors, five days after a huge earthquake struck central Japan and killed at least 126 people.
The death toll from the New Year’s Day 7.5 magnitude quake in the Ishikawa region of Japan’s main Honshu island was certain to rise, with 210 people still unaccounted for, authorities said.
The work of thousands of rescue workers has been hampered by bad weather – with snow forecast for today – and roads torn apart by gaping cracks and blocked by an estimated 1,000 landslides.
Two elderly women were pulled from the wreckage of their homes on Thursday in the badly hit city of Wajima on the Noto peninsula.
In Suzu, where dozens of homes lie in ruins, a dog barked while an AFP team filmed the clean-up operation on Friday, the signal of a grim discovery. Houses containing any fatalities that are discovered are being marked and left alone until a coroner can come with relatives to identify the body.
Fishing boats were sunk or lifted onto the shore by tsunami waves that also reportedly swept one person away.
The coastal community of Shiromaru, which was hit by a tsunami several metres high on January 1, was a tangled mess of wooden, metal and plastic debris.
