Quake toll rises as rescue continues

1.6 million families still without power on Hokkaido island

TOKYO - Rescue workers with bulldozers and sniffer dogs scrabbled through the mud on Friday to find survivors from a landslide that buried houses after a powerful quake, as the death toll rose to 18.

Twenty-two people are still unaccounted for in the small northern countryside town of Atsuma, where a cluster of dwellings were wrecked when a hillside collapsed with the force of the 6.7-magnitude quake, causing deep brown scars in the landscape.