Japan races to find tsunami dead despite radiation-

FE Team | Published: April 08, 2011 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

MINAMI SOMA, Japan, Apr 7 (AP): Japanese police raced Thursday to find thousands of missing bodies before they decompose along a stretch of tsunami-pummeled coast that has been largely off-limits because of a radiation-leaking nuclear plant. Nearly a month after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake generated the tsunami along Japan's northeastern coast, more than 15,000 people are still missing. Many of those may have been washed out to sea and will never be found. In the days just after the March 11 disaster, searchers gingerly picked through mountains of tangled debris, hoping to find survivors. Heavier machinery has since been called in, but unpredictable tides of radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex have slowed progress and often forced authorities to abandon the search, especially within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) evacuation zone around the plant. Officials now say there's not much time left to find and identify the dead, and are ramping up those efforts.