Rescuers Dig Through Night, Recover Bodies From Tunnel Cave-In

The last of the 20 bodies crushed in a collapsed tunnel was pulled out late Saturday, bringing sad relief to this close-knit fishing village after a week of painful waiting.

Rescuers worked into the night in the seaside tunnel, 550 miles north of Tokyo, struggling to remove body parts still wedged in the boulders.

There were no survivors from the Feb. 10 cavein, when a boulder the size of a skyscraper slipped from a mountainside and crashed into the tunnel, trapping 19 aboard a bus and a man in a car.

Rescuers began bringing out the bodies from the bus Saturday afternoon. By early Sunday, all had been identified and returned to their families. Digging will continue Sunday to make sure there were no other victims.

Holding their heads in their hands, sobbing family members were led through heavy snow to a makeshift morgue at a fisheries research center.

A few blocks away, people gathered in the living room of Takako Watanabe, 43, an innkeeper who lost friends in the cave-in, to watch news reports on television.

“This week has been so full of tears,” she said. “Nobody is happy about it, but it is a relief to have it over. Fate seems to be playing itself out.”

Police said all 20 had been crushed to death but stopped short of saying whether all had died instantly.