Authorities say there are still seven people missing from huge landslides from the hills over Hiroshima in western Japan.  So far, 39 people are dead, including a rescuer who was killed by a secondary slide after he had pulled five others to safety.

There were at least six different slides in one area.  Self Defense Force troops fanned out to dig people and homes out.  But the rescuers’ work was made all that much more difficult by the streams of mud and silt that kept coming down.  TV News networks showed aerial footage of huge gashes in the mountains where the land gave out and turned into torrents of brown mud, granite boulders, and bamboo, which in turn cut downward through suburban hillside neighborhoods at the edge of the city. 

But even the suburbs in Japan are densely packed, because the mountainous country has limited flat spaces on which to build.  That puts community developments right up on the edge of forests and farmland that, in the past, would normally be able to absorb heavy rain and shifting landscapes without much notice.  There are around 32,000 places in Hiroshima Prefecture that at designated landslide danger zones.