Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard, and smelled something subtly different. Much depended upon where you were, and the obstacles that the water had to overcome to reach you. Some described a waterfall, cascading over seawall and embankment. For others, it was a fast-rising flood between houses, deceptively slight at first, tugging trippingly at the feet and ankles, but quickly sucking and battering at legs and chests and shoulders. In color, it was described as brown, gray, black, white. The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai: blue-green and cresting elegantly in tentacles of foam. The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat.
It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. It was as if neighborhoods, villages, whole towns were being placed inside the jaws of a giant compressor and crushed.
From the hillside where they had narrowly escaped to safety, Waichi Nagano and his wife, Hideko, could see the whole scene spread out below them, as the water swept in pulsing surges over the embankment and across the village and the fields. “It was a huge black mountain of water that came on all at once and destroyed the houses,” he said. “It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn’t like the sound of the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a kind of crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.”
There was another, fainter noise. “It was the voices of children,” said Hideko. “They were crying out—‘Help! Help!’” On the hill above, where he had half climbed, half floated to safety, Kazuo Takahashi heard them too. “I heard children,” he said. “But the water was swirling around, there was the crunching sound of the wave and the rubble, and their voices became weaker and weaker.”
How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question?” he asked. “Because I have a friend who can tell you.”
He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki city hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and traveling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spent his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for “disaster countermeasures.” Few people were more knowledgeable about the menace of earthquakes and their particular threat to the Kitakami area. “Our assumption was that there would be another big quake,” Konno said. “There hadn’t been a tsunami since the 1896 and 1933 quakes, so we expected that too.” There was no doubt that the small village where the town office was located, situated at the mouth of the river, two and a half miles downstream of Kamaya, would be in its path. Konno and his colleagues bent their efforts to ensuring that they would ride it out.
The two-story branch office had been built on a rise fifteen feet above sea level, and its ground floor had been elevated a further ten feet above that. Essential utilities, such as electricity and communications, had been installed on the uppermost floor. On the wall was a digital readout that recorded the intensity of tremors as they occurred. As recently as the previous August, the city government had conducted a drill in which police, fire brigade, and local officials acted out their roles in case of an earthquake and tsunami.
When the moment finally arrived, Konno experienced it with the calm detachment of a disaster professional.
“It came in three stages,” he told me. “When the shaking first began it was strong but slow. I looked at the monitor. It showed an intensity of upper five, and I knew that this was it.” Even as the rocking continued, he was calling to his staff to make a public announcement: a tsunami warning, he knew, would soon be issued. “But the shaking went on,” Konno said. “It got stronger and stronger. The PC screens and piles of documents were all falling off the desks. And then in the third stage, it became worse still.” Konno gripped his desk amid a tumult of competing sounds.
Pieces of office furniture were rattling and colliding as they shunted across the room. Filing cabinets were disgorging their files. Now he looked up again at the wall-mounted readout of seismic intensity: it displayed only an error message. Then, gradually, like the slowing of a beating heart, the shaking and the panic eased, and the employees of the Ishinomaki Kitakami General Branch Office sprang to their appointed tasks.
The emergency generator rumbled into life, the toppled television was lifted off the floor and reconnected, and the tsunami warning was relayed through the municipal loudspeakers. Oikawa and his men were dispatched to those communities where the loudspeakers had failed. Just as had been planned, representatives of the police and the fire brigade relocated to the town branch office. “Everything functioned very well,” Konno said. “No one was hurt, everyone was calm, and there was only slight damage to the building. We had drilled for this. Everyone knew who should do what, and what to do next.”
Soon there were fifty-seven people in the branch office. Thirty-one of them were locals who had evacuated from more vulnerable premises to the safety of the strong, modern building. They included six children from a nearby school, the counterpart of Okawa Elementary School on the north side of the river, as well as eight old people from the local day-care center. Three of them were in wheelchairs; four more were carried in on stretchers. Volunteers sprang forward to help them safely and comfortably up to the sanctuary of the second floor.
At 3:14 pm, the estimated height of the imminent tsunami was revised from 20 feet to 33 feet. But at some point the backup electricity generator failed, and Konno and his colleagues never received this information. It would have made no difference anyway.
The building, mounted on its elevation, faced inland, with its back to the river and its front entrance facing the hills over the small village below. From his window, the only water Konno could see was a sluggish brown stream, little more than a drain, which trickled into the Kitakami. “That was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “The water in the creek had become white. It was churning and frothing, and it was flowing the wrong way. Then it was overflowing, and there was more water coming in from the river behind, and it was surrounding the houses. I saw the post-office building, lifting up and turning over in the water. Some of the houses were being crushed, but some of them were lifting up and floating.” The destruction was accompanied by that mysterious noise. “I never heard anything like it,” Konno said. “It was partly the rushing of the water, but also the sound of timber, twisting and tearing.” In the space of five minutes, the entire community of 80 houses had been physically uprooted and thrust, bobbing, against the barrier of the hills.
by Richard Lloyd Parry, LitHub | Read more:
It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. It was as if neighborhoods, villages, whole towns were being placed inside the jaws of a giant compressor and crushed.From the hillside where they had narrowly escaped to safety, Waichi Nagano and his wife, Hideko, could see the whole scene spread out below them, as the water swept in pulsing surges over the embankment and across the village and the fields. “It was a huge black mountain of water that came on all at once and destroyed the houses,” he said. “It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn’t like the sound of the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a kind of crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.”
There was another, fainter noise. “It was the voices of children,” said Hideko. “They were crying out—‘Help! Help!’” On the hill above, where he had half climbed, half floated to safety, Kazuo Takahashi heard them too. “I heard children,” he said. “But the water was swirling around, there was the crunching sound of the wave and the rubble, and their voices became weaker and weaker.”
How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question?” he asked. “Because I have a friend who can tell you.”
He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki city hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and traveling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spent his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for “disaster countermeasures.” Few people were more knowledgeable about the menace of earthquakes and their particular threat to the Kitakami area. “Our assumption was that there would be another big quake,” Konno said. “There hadn’t been a tsunami since the 1896 and 1933 quakes, so we expected that too.” There was no doubt that the small village where the town office was located, situated at the mouth of the river, two and a half miles downstream of Kamaya, would be in its path. Konno and his colleagues bent their efforts to ensuring that they would ride it out.
The two-story branch office had been built on a rise fifteen feet above sea level, and its ground floor had been elevated a further ten feet above that. Essential utilities, such as electricity and communications, had been installed on the uppermost floor. On the wall was a digital readout that recorded the intensity of tremors as they occurred. As recently as the previous August, the city government had conducted a drill in which police, fire brigade, and local officials acted out their roles in case of an earthquake and tsunami.
When the moment finally arrived, Konno experienced it with the calm detachment of a disaster professional.
“It came in three stages,” he told me. “When the shaking first began it was strong but slow. I looked at the monitor. It showed an intensity of upper five, and I knew that this was it.” Even as the rocking continued, he was calling to his staff to make a public announcement: a tsunami warning, he knew, would soon be issued. “But the shaking went on,” Konno said. “It got stronger and stronger. The PC screens and piles of documents were all falling off the desks. And then in the third stage, it became worse still.” Konno gripped his desk amid a tumult of competing sounds.
Pieces of office furniture were rattling and colliding as they shunted across the room. Filing cabinets were disgorging their files. Now he looked up again at the wall-mounted readout of seismic intensity: it displayed only an error message. Then, gradually, like the slowing of a beating heart, the shaking and the panic eased, and the employees of the Ishinomaki Kitakami General Branch Office sprang to their appointed tasks.
The emergency generator rumbled into life, the toppled television was lifted off the floor and reconnected, and the tsunami warning was relayed through the municipal loudspeakers. Oikawa and his men were dispatched to those communities where the loudspeakers had failed. Just as had been planned, representatives of the police and the fire brigade relocated to the town branch office. “Everything functioned very well,” Konno said. “No one was hurt, everyone was calm, and there was only slight damage to the building. We had drilled for this. Everyone knew who should do what, and what to do next.”
Soon there were fifty-seven people in the branch office. Thirty-one of them were locals who had evacuated from more vulnerable premises to the safety of the strong, modern building. They included six children from a nearby school, the counterpart of Okawa Elementary School on the north side of the river, as well as eight old people from the local day-care center. Three of them were in wheelchairs; four more were carried in on stretchers. Volunteers sprang forward to help them safely and comfortably up to the sanctuary of the second floor.
At 3:14 pm, the estimated height of the imminent tsunami was revised from 20 feet to 33 feet. But at some point the backup electricity generator failed, and Konno and his colleagues never received this information. It would have made no difference anyway.
The building, mounted on its elevation, faced inland, with its back to the river and its front entrance facing the hills over the small village below. From his window, the only water Konno could see was a sluggish brown stream, little more than a drain, which trickled into the Kitakami. “That was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “The water in the creek had become white. It was churning and frothing, and it was flowing the wrong way. Then it was overflowing, and there was more water coming in from the river behind, and it was surrounding the houses. I saw the post-office building, lifting up and turning over in the water. Some of the houses were being crushed, but some of them were lifting up and floating.” The destruction was accompanied by that mysterious noise. “I never heard anything like it,” Konno said. “It was partly the rushing of the water, but also the sound of timber, twisting and tearing.” In the space of five minutes, the entire community of 80 houses had been physically uprooted and thrust, bobbing, against the barrier of the hills.
by Richard Lloyd Parry, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
