A rescue worker carries a girl who was stranded in a building in Kesennuma. (AP)

Nakaminato (Japan), March 12: Japan today mobilised a nationwide rescue effort to pluck survivors from collapsed buildings and rush food and water to thousands in an earthquake and tsunami zone under siege, without water, electricity, heat or telephone service.

Entire villages in parts of the north have vanished under a wall of water, many communities are cut off and a nuclear emergency was unfolding near two stricken reactors as Japanese tried to absorb the scale of the destruction following yesterday’s powerful earthquake and destructive tsunami.

Japanese news media estimates of the death toll ranged between 1,300 and 1,700, but much of the north was impassible. The confirmed death toll from yesterday’s twin disasters was 686.

(Top) A military plane’s nose is stuck in a building at Matsushima air base as train coaches lie overturned in Shinchi town after being washed away by the tsunami. (AP)

Four passenger trains had not been accounted for as of tonight, The Associated Press reported. Most of the deaths were from drowning, but firefighters and Japan’s Self-Defence Forces were rushing to prevent a higher toll, flying in helicopters and struggling to put out fires ignited by exploding gas lines or overturned space heaters in Japan’s many vulnerable wooden homes.

The country had clearly learned the lessons of the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995, when Japan refused to accept offers of international help, leading to criticisms that many of the 6,000 killed died unnecessarily. The US, which has several military bases in Japan, is sending in helicopters, destroyers, and an aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, which has the ability to act as a hospital as well as convert sea water into drinking water, according to a spokesman for the Navy’s 7th fleet in Japan.

Even as estimates of the death toll from yesterday’s quake rose, Japan’s Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, said 50,000 troops would be mobilised for the increasingly desperate rescue recovery effort, according to the Associated Press. By late today, more than a day after the quake, rescuers had still not arrived in the worst-affected areas.

Meanwhile, several ships from the US Navy joined the rapidly-expanding rescue effort. The USS McCampbell and the USS Curtis Wilbur, both destroyers, prepared to move into position off Miyagi prefecture to assist Japanese forces with search and rescue efforts. Convoys of Japanese military helicopters could be seen flying over the earthquake zone

Saturday, and trucks filled with soldiers were moving heavy equipment into the area.

Near the heart of the quake zone in Sendai, 200 to 300 bodies had washed up on local beaches, according to reports from the police.

Japan was filled with scenes of desperation. Kazushige Itabashi, an official in Natori city, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, said several districts in an area near Sendai’s airport were annihilated.

Rescuers found 870 people in one elementary school this morning and were trying to reach 1,200 people in the junior high school, closer to the water. There was no electricity and no water for people in shelters. According to a newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, about 600 people were on the roof of a public grade school, in Sendai. By this morning, Japan’s Self-Defence Forces and firefighters had evacuated about 150 of them. On the rooftop of Chuo Hospital in the city of Iwanuma, doctors and nurses were waving white flags and pink umbrellas, according to TV Asahi.

On the floor of the roof, they wrote “Help” in English, and “Food” in Japanese. The reporter, observing the scene from a helicopter, said: “If anyone in the City Hall office is watching, please help them.” The station also showed scenes of people stranded on a bridge, cut off by water on both sides near the mouth of the Abukuma river in Miyagi Prefecture.

People were frantically searching for their relatives. Fumiaki Yamato, 70, was in his second home in a mountain village outside of Sendai when the earthquake struck. He spoke from his car as he was driving toward Sendai trying to find the rest of his family. While it usually takes about an hour to drive to the city, parts of the road were impassable. “I’m getting worried,” he said as he pulled over to take a reporter’s call. “I don’t know how many hours it’s going to take.”

Japanese, accustomed to frequent earthquakes, were stunned by this one’s magnitude and the more than 100 aftershocks, many equivalent to major quakes. “I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official at Sendai City Hall. “I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger.”

Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted.

Vasily V. Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Centre for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the centre of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. “In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis,” he said. “But it’s still not enough time.”