Military and other rescue workers began airlifting more than two dozen bodies from the ash-blanketed peak of a Japanese volcano on Monday morning, as family members of the missing waited at a nearby elementary school.
At least 31 people are believed to have died. Four victims were flown down Sunday, and rescuers returned to 3,067-meter (10,062-foot) Mt. Ontake on Monday morning to recover the remaining 27. Exactly how they died remains unclear, whether from toxic gases, suffocating ash, falling rocks or other causes.
Scenes broadcast live on Japanese TV station TBS showed soldiers carrying yellow body bags one-by-one to a camouflage military helicopter that had landed in a relatively wide-open area of the now bleak landscape, its rotors still spinning.
The first bodies were flown to a nearby athletic field, its green grass and surrounding forested hills contrasting with Mt. Ontake’s ash-gray peak in the background, a reduced plume still emerging from its crater.
There, they were transferred to white police vans, while two dozen officers struggled to hold up long blue tarps under the spinning rotors, blocking the view from the media.
The four brought down Sunday have been confirmed dead, said Takehiko Furukoshi, a Nagano prefecture crisis-management official, ABC informs.
