Rescuers and residents searched through rubble on Saturday as their focus shifted to retrieving bodies and cleaning up rather than looking for survivors, five days after a massive earthquake struck central Japan and killed about 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 had been estimated certain to rise. At the time of making this report, at least 210 people are still unaccounted for.
The gruelling job of thousands of rescue workers has been impeded by bad weather — with a snowy weather being forecast for Sunday — and roads torn apart by gaping cracks and blocked by an approximate 1,000 landslides.
A canine trainer Masayo Kikuchi had informed AFP that training fir disaster rescue dogs begins with something homogenous to a game of hide-and-seek.
“They are trained to bark when they seeing a person under the rubble.” Kikuchi had said.
Houses containing any discovered dead bodies are marked and left alone until a coroner can come with relatives to recognize the body.
The tsunami waves had sunk Fishing boats and lifted some like toys onto the shore. Unfortunately it is reportedly that it had swept one person away.
The coastal community of Shiromaru, was hit by a tsunami several metres high on January 1st. The once lively and serene community is now a twisted mess of wooden, metal and plastic debris.
