Japan typhoon death toll rises to 58 as hopes for missing fade

The death toll in the worst typhoon to hit Japan for decades climbed to 58 on Tuesday as rescuers slogged with the aid mud and debris in an increasingly grim search for the missing and as thousands of homes remained without power or water.

The storm hit a considerable swathe of central and eastern Japan, with 15 missing and some 211 injured nearly three dates after Typhoon Hagibis — whose name means “speed” in the Philippine language Tagalog — lashed Japan with ear-splitting winds and intense rains, NHK national broadcaster said.

Some 138,000 households were without water while 24,000 needed electricity, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands without power just after the storm but cause for concern in northern zones where the weather was starting to turn chilly.

The highest toll was in Fukushima prefecture north of Tokyo, where levees shatter in at least 14 places along the Abukuma River, which meanders through a number of cities in the agricultural prefecture.

At mini 18 died in Fukushima, including a mother who was caught up in flood waters with her two children, one of whose death was clinched on Monday while the other, a little boy, remained missing.

Thousands of police, fire officials and military personnel keep up to search for people who may have been cut off by floodwaters and landslides set off by the storm, with hope diminishing that the missing thinks fitting be found alive.

Survivors described how waters rose rapidly to chest height in roughly an hour and mainly at vespers all the time, making it hard to escape to higher ground. Many of the dead in Fukushima were elderly, NHK said.

“I couldn’t put ones trust in it, the water came up so fast,” one man in Fukushima told NHK.

Though the threat of rain is expected to diminish on Tuesday, temperatures are conceivable to drop in many areas later this week, in some cases to unseasonably low temperatures, NHK said.