The elderly woman emerged slowly on a stretcher, wrapped in blankets. Dazed but conscious, she thanked the firefighters, wearing helmets and headlamps, as they lifted her over the rubble of a collapsed house. <\/p>\n
She\u2019s a survivor of the deadly\u00a07.5 magnitude quake that struck Japan on Monday, which devastated the formerly idyllic seaside city of Wajima, in hard-hit Ishikawa Prefecture. <\/p>\n
In the city, once a popular tourist destination famous for its bustling morning market, firefighters and rescue workers worked through the night to find those still trapped or missing. <\/p>\n
And while rescues like that of the woman, aged in her 80s, on Thursday provided glimmers of hope, the search grew increasingly desperate as the clock ticked, with at least 242 people still unaccounted for, according to the prefecture. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe situation is terribly challenging, but until those 72 hours crucial for saving lives pass, we will do our utmost to save and rescue as many people as possible with everything we have on the ground,\u201d said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Thursday. <\/p>\n
The first 72 hours after a natural disaster are considered the \u201cgolden period\u201d for finding survivors, as the condition of people trapped and injured can deteriorate quickly afterward. <\/p>\n
In Suzu city, about an hour\u2019s drive from Wajima across the battered Noto peninsula, video from Wednesday showed rescuers digging through the rubble of a collapsed house and carrying out a <\/strong>79-year-old man covered in dust and dirt. <\/p>\n In the video, medical personnel quickly attended to the man as his daughter watched tearfully from the side, calling out to him. He was conscious and taken to hospital, according to TV Asahi. <\/p>\n But the search has been hindered by the sheer amount of destruction across the prefecture, as well as poor weather and constant aftershocks. Entire communities have been cut off by landslides and impassable roads; telecommunications also posed a problem, with phone lines, mobile masts and the internet down in many areas. <\/p>\n Roads were riven with enormous cracks, and littered with debris such as large boulders while the lack of signal meant no access to navigation apps or outside communication. By evening, it had turned rainy, foggy and dark with poor visibility \u2013 posing further challenges for rescue workers scrambling to locate survivors. <\/p>\n After the initial earthquake, a massive fire broke out in Wajima \u2013 leaving hundreds of buildings burned and blackened, and the famous morning market mostly reduced to rubble. <\/p>\n The scale of the rescue operation has meant personnel being dispatched from across the nation to Ishikawa \u2013 ranging from local officials and police to military troops. <\/p>\n The woman in her 80s rescued Thursday had been pulled out by firefighters sent from Osaka prefecture \u2013 hundreds of kilometers from Wajima. <\/p>\n A man had also been retrieved from the collapsed house before the woman, but was declared dead on the scene. <\/p>\n The quake has killed at least 92 people as of Friday morning, according to Ishikawa prefecture. And the little help getting through is far from enough, with water, food and blankets in short supply. <\/p>\n At a brief news conference on Thursday, Wajima city hall officials warned there are reports of people dying in evacuation centers \u2013 though they added the lack of communications means there\u2019s no way to confirm the extent of damage or amount of aid needed in some cut-off locations. <\/p>\n Some evacuees are taking shelter in the city hall, sleeping on cardboard and mats. With no running water, sanitation problems are emerging\u00a0\u2014 and the four-story building is running out of space, with families, pets and children huddled together on each floor. <\/p>\n These survivors are now reckoning with the aftermath, grieving those lost and trying to retrieve what they can. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hell \u2013 I\u2019ve never seen anything like this. It\u2019s my first time experiencing something like this,\u201d said Kyoko Izumi, a liquor store owner in Wajima. \u201cThe aftershocks are really scary. They happened multiple times throughout the night \u2026 it felt like the entire ground was getting pushed up beneath me.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cLooking at the state of this morning market, I don\u2019t know if they can work or not, and it will take time to rebuild,\u201d she said, gazing around at the scorched ruins. <\/p>\n\n The elderly woman emerged slowly on a stretcher, wrapped in blankets. Dazed but conscious, she thanked the firefighters, wearing helmets and headlamps, as they lifted her over the rubble of a collapsed house. She\u2019s a survivor of the deadly\u00a07.5 magnitude quake that struck Japan on Monday, which devastated the formerly idyllic seaside city of Wajima, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}