Rescue efforts resume as deaths mount from Japan volcano

TOKYO — At least 31 people are believed to have died from this weekend’s volcanic eruption at Mt. Ontake in central Japan as authorities continue efforts to recover bodies.

Four of the 31 victims found without a pulse were brought down yesterday (Sept 28) from the mountain, Japan’s second-highest volcano. Efforts to retrieve the other 27 resumed this morning after rescue work was halted yesterday afternoon due to a strong smell of sulphur, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Smoke and ash has billowed from Ontake’s craters since the eruption shortly before noon on Sept 27, as efforts continued to find missing hikers and bring down the injured. Mr Takeo Kamata, 60, said a hot wind blew and it became difficult to breathe when the 3,067m volcano erupted.

“Little volcanic rocks struck my legs and back. I thought if a big one hits me I’m dead,” Mr Kamata said in an interview yesterday with public broadcaster NHK. “I was thinking of my family, saying ‘sorry, goodbye.’”

Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said at 7am today it was in the process of revising the number of people unaccounted for. The agency put that number at 45 yesterday.

Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Holdings, a Tokyo-based insurance company, said six of its nine employees had gone missing during a hike on the mountain, the Asahi newspaper reported today.

MOUNTAIN LODGES

Dozens who had sheltered overnight in mountain lodges descended to trail heads yesterday, some aided by police, fire and military rescue teams, their jackets coated with volcanic ash and their noses and mouths protected by white surgical masks.

Ms Naofumi Miyairi, a spokesman for the Nagano prefectural police, declined to comment on the circumstances surrounding the 31 found unresponsive on the mountainside beyond saying they were all in cardiac arrest and four male bodies had been brought down yesterday by helicopter.

Ontake, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures, offers scenic views of the 3,000m peaks of Japan’s Northern and Southern Alps.

Clear skies two days ago would have drawn an especially large number of hikers to the mountain’s popular trails, Mr Arata Matsunaga, a staffer at the tourism association in Nagano prefecture’s Kiso town, said yesterday by phone. He declined to speculate how many may have been hiking in the area or whether the official count of missing hikers is likely to increase.

At least 35 people spent the night after the eruption on the Gifu side of the mountain, Mr Takashi Sugishita, a spokesman for the prefectural disaster management office, said by phone.

Seven climbers were flown off the mountain yesterday and some were hospitalised, NHK reported.

REPORTS ON MISSING

Figures on the number of missing have been compiled using reports from operators of mountain lodges, so only include those who stayed in the area overnight, Mr Hiroshi Koizumi, a spokesman for Nagano’s crisis management section, said by phone.

About 540 police, fire and military personnel were aiding the rescue effort today, Nagano prefecture’s crisis management section said in a statement.

The last previous fatalities from volcanic activity in Japan were 43 people killed in the 1991 eruption of Mt. Unzen, on Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, according to Mr Charles Connor, a geophysicist specialising in volcanoes at the University of South Florida.

Web camera images from a nearby tourist site showed an ashy white haze billowing from the volcano’s craters, in stark contrast to the gray clouds that spread over the mountain’s contours soon after the eruption.

OPENING PHASE

“Often activity continues for quite some time at these types of volcanoes,” Mr Connor said. “It would not be unusual for this to be a relatively low volume sort of opening phase of a higher level of activity at the volcano.”

Japan lies on the so-called “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines surrounding the Pacific Basin, and it sits at the three-way meeting point of the North American, Eurasian and Philippine Sea tectonic plates.

Ontake is one of more than 100 active volcanoes in Japan, according to the website www.volcanodiscovery.com, which dates the mountain’s first recorded eruption to 1979, when ash fell as far as 150km away.

The volcano erupted most recently in March 2007, according to the weather agency, which warned on its website of volcanic-ash falls in Gifu, Nagano and Yamanashi prefectures. BLOOMBERG