Japan quake toll keeps rising

NO LEADS: NUMBER OF MISSING PEOPLE JUMPS TO 330

Many others have to stay in crowded emergency sites.

The number of people unaccounted for after Japan’s New Year’s Day earthquake more than tripled to 323 yesterday, while the death toll rose to 168, according to local authorities.

A heavy dumping of snow, meanwhile, complicated relief efforts a week after the 7.5-magnitude quake, with more than 2 000 people still cut off and many others lacking power or forced to take shelter in crowded emergency sites.

A new list published by Ishikawa prefecture in central Japan yesterday showed the number of missing people soaring from 31 to 281 in Wajima, one of the worsthit places, where the quake flatted dozens of houses and a major fire devastated a large area.

In the prefecture’s city of Suzu, a woman in her 90s managed to survive five days under the wreckage of a collapsed house before being saved on Saturday.

“Hang in there,” rescuers were heard calling to the woman, in police footage from the rainy scene published by local media.

“You’re gonna be okay,” they shouted. “Stay positive.”

Not all were so lucky, with Naoyuki Teramoto, 52, inconsolable yesterday after three of his four children’s bodies were discovered in the town of Anamizu.

“We were talking of plans to go to Izu,” a famous hot spring resort after his daughter passed her high school entrance exam, he told broadcaster NTV.

Days of rain increased the risk of further landslides, while the fresh heavy snow – more than 10 centimetres in places – could cause more buildings to collapse under its weight, the regional government warned.

Around 18 000 households in the Ishikawa region remained without electricity yesterday, while more than 66 100 households were without water on Sunday.

For the 28 800 people packed into government shelters, many were also without sufficient water, electricity and heating, according to media reports.

“Disaster-related deaths must be prevented at all costs. I want to improve the poor environment in shelters,” Ishikawa governor Hiroshi Hase told broadcaster NHK.

The government has “deployed various police and fire department helicopters” as well as small groups of troops on foot to reach the isolated communities, he said.

Japan experiences hundreds of earthquakes every year, though most cause no damage because of strict building codes in place for more than four decades. –