2 DEAD, AT LEAST 20 MISSING IN HUGE MUDSLIDE WEST OF TOKYO

An enormous mudslide caused by heavy rainfall has destroyed at least 10 homes and damaged hundreds of others in Japan, killing two people in the process, with 20 still missing, Lars Nicolaysen reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

Two women found in "cardiac and respiratory arrest" were later pronounced dead. The whereabouts of about 20 people were unknown after the incident in the coastal town of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture southwest of Tokyo.

The masses of mud flattened everything in their path: electricity pylons, cars, entire residential buildings that collapsed like a house of cards, and streets that sank into the mud, Nicolaysen reported.

Reporting for the Associated Press (AP), Mari Yamaguchi and Yuri Kageyama said on July 4, 2021, that as many as 80 homes in Atami were completely buried, and an official with the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said more people, possibly 100, could still be missing under the mudslides but warned that details were not immediately clear.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on the policy at Japanese bureaucracies, revealed that aggressive rescue operations were underway.

"The earth slid to the front of the shop. It sounded like an excavator smashing a house," an employee of a glass studio in Atami told reporters. Cars parked in front were washed away, he said.

The mudslide was estimated to be traveling at about 40 kilometers per hour, Professor Motoyuki Ushiyama of the Shizuoka University Centre for Integrated Research and Education of Natural Hazards told Kyodo News.

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