Rescue workers recover bodies of 31 hikers at Japanese volcano summit

Rescue workers have found 31 people unconscious and believed to be dead near the peak of an erupting volcano in central Japan, local government and police said Sunday. Nagano prefecture posted on its website that about 30 people had heart and lung failure, the customary way for Japanese authorities to describe a body until police doctors can examine it. At least four of the victims were being brought down from Mount Ontake on Sunday afternoon, one day after the volcano erupted. More than 500 Japanese military personnel and police headed up Mount Ontake to search for survivors on Sunday.

It was tremendous. I prepared for death when I got caught in the dust under a pine tree.

Amateur cameraman Keiji Aoki

Hundreds of people, including children, were stranded on the peak after it erupted without warning just before noon on Saturday, sending ash pouring down the slope for more than 3 km. Most made their way down that evening. Online video footage showed huge grey clouds boiling towards climbers at the peak and people scrambling to descend as blackness enveloped them. An official at the volcano division of the Japan Meteorological Agency said that, while there had been a rising number of small earthquakes detected at Ontake since Sept. 10, the eruption could not have been predicted. The last significant eruption of Mount Ontake, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures in the centre of the country, was in 1979.

There were no other signs of an imminent eruption, such as earth movements or changes on the mountain’s surface. With only the earthquakes, we couldn’t really say this would lead to an eruption.

A Japan Meteorological Agency official