All 25 people on the Alumni Association travel group to Japan are safe and headed to a hotel in Tokyo, said Joseph Matty, executive director of the Alumni Association.

Matty said the group had landed at the Tokyo International Airport and were at the baggage claim when the 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit. Matty said he is in contact with the one of the staff members on the trip.

Matty said all emergency contacts for the group have been called and told their family members they are OK.

The airport is currently closed for the next two days, Matty said. He said he is unsure if the group will leave once the airport reopens. The trip was supposed to last until March 19.

The alumni association offers around 8 trips a year to different parts of the world.

Police said 200 to 300 bodies were found in the northeastern coastal city of Sendai, the city in Miyagi prefecture, or state, closest to the epicenter. But authorities said they weren’t able to reach the area because of damage to the roads.

A police official, who declined to be named because of department policy, said it may be a while before rescuers could reach the area to get more precise body count. So far, they have confirmed 178 were killed, with 584 missing. Police also said 947 people were injured.

The magnitude-8.9 offshore quake triggered a 23-foot (seven-meter) tsunami and was followed for hours by more than 50 aftershocks, many of them more than magnitude 6.0. In the early hours of Saturday, a magnitude-6.7 earthquake struck the central, mountainous part of the country – far from the original quake’s epicenter. It was not immediately clear if this latest quake was related to the others.

Friday’s massive quake shook dozens of cities and villages along a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) stretch of coast, including Tokyo, hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the epicenter. A large section of Kesennuma, a town of 70,000 people in Miyagi, burned furiously into the night with no apparent hope of being extinguished, public broadcaster NHK said.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.