Five days after an intense earthquake rocked central Japan, killing at least 110 people, rescuers and locals combed through wreckage on Saturday as the focus shifted from locating survivors to retrieving corpses and cleaning up.
With 210 persons still missing from the 7.5-magnitude earthquake that struck the Ishikawa area of Japan’s main Honshu island on New Year’s Day, the death toll from the incident was expected to grow, according to officials.
The work of thousands of rescue workers has been hampered by bad weather – snow was forecast for Sunday – 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, but since there has been no reason for cheer.
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.
In the port city fishing boats were sunk or lifted like toys 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
“The tsunami came from the cove of Shiromaru through the river, and then ran up through the street,” said one of its roughly 100 residents, Toshio Sakashita.
“We have received no public support here. Look, the main street is still blocked due to the rubble, which has been left untouched,” the 69-year-old told AFP.
