Four victims were brought down and confirmed dead, one day after Mount Ontake’s big initial eruption, said Takehiko Furukoshi, a Nagano prefecture crisis-management official. The 27 others were listed as having heart and lung failure, the customary way for Japanese authorities to describe a body until police doctors can examine it.
Officials provided no details on how they may have died.
It was the first fatal eruption in modern times at 3,067-meter (10,062-foot) Mount Ontake, a popular climbing destination about 210 kilometers (130 miles) west of Tokyo on the main Japanese island of Honshu. A similar eruption occurred in 1979, but no one died.
khon2.com
