[ad_1]
“A wave from hell”.
Matt Ketchum was muttering as he showed me the video he had recorded on his phone of the terrifying moment when the tsunami struck his city a few days earlier.
Miyako, on the northeast coast of Japan, became world famous for images of a jet black wall of water launching yachts onto a road that runs along the coast.
The nautical debris was still evident when I arrived with my colleague Pol Reygaerts, including a huge cruise liner stuck against the twin columns of an overpass.
Equating the tsunami with demonic force wasn’t just the reaction of Matt, an English teacher from Pennsylvania.
The destruction of districts, if not entire cities, was described to me over and over again as almost evil.
The nearby city of Tora was another terrifying example of things washed away.
Upon arrival, Pol and I were able to identify a train station on the left and a baseball stand on the right. Between those two points, a distance of about half a kilometer, nothing was left standing. As a light snow fell, we stood and stared in disbelief.
However, the destruction was only half.
Walking the remaining streets and seeing the personal belongings of people who had fled, or who were probably dead, was deeply uncomfortable. I felt like a voyeur trampling on his nightmare.
The scenes of torment were repeated.
I remember meeting a woman in another devastated city who was desperately searching for her elderly mother for the previous two days.
Such was the magnitude of the destruction in his neighborhood, he couldn’t even identify where his family’s home had once been, so he didn’t know where to focus his search.
One fear that everyone in those towns shared was that a second tsunami could wreak even more havoc.
One day we came across a red fire truck in the middle of the road. A man with a screeching walkie-talkie yelled at us to go quickly to the right and we veered down a hill.
It turned out that a helicopter had detected an incoming tsunami and the estimated impact was 15 minutes. A repetitive electronic ping was reverberating around a small crowd of motorists, as we gazed out at the Pacific Ocean.
In the end, nothing happened. Yet terror was etched on the faces of a couple standing on a nearby bridge, wrapped in blankets, staring fearfully out to sea. They knew too well what a second wave would mean.
Getting to Japan had been exceptionally chaotic, even by the abnormal standards journalists operate by.
He was in Brussels reporting on glacial developments at a summit of EU leaders when the call came.
Details were only emerging that a magnitude 9 earthquake had caused a tsunami that triggered a level 7 nuclear accident when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was swallowed up.
There was widespread destruction on the east coast of Japan. The death toll was estimated in thousands.
I was informed that making the flight from Paris to Tokyo was extremely tight: Pol and I would have to get to the main train station in Brussels in less than an hour, get off at Charles de Gaulle airport, and literally rush to the departures.
Although I had just been appointed European correspondent for RTÉ News, my family and I still had to move to the city. My suit and a couple of shirts for a supposed two-day trip to the Belgian capital were clearly going to be of little use in a disaster zone.
My longtime colleague and friend Tony Connelly generously chimed in. As we are roughly the same height and build, he gave me the keys to his apartment and I looted his jeans, boots, sweaters, and coat, carrying them all in his backpack.
Neither Pol nor I had ever been to Tokyo before. We arrived at night, but the density of the metropolis, with its skyscrapers adorned with neon lights, was astonishing.
Within minutes of arriving at our hotel, we experienced the first of many aftermath.
The minute-long shaking felt like a subway train rolling a meter under your feet. I unconsciously held my breath once the sensation started.
The next morning, it was clear that we had no chance to get north to Sendai province, where the tsunami hit the Fukushima plant.
Roads were clogged, and emergency services trying to deal with a radiation-emitting plant were given priority.
So we decided to go another route.
We flew almost 700 kilometers to the northern island of Hokkaido, took a ferry south across Mutsu Bay to the mainland, and then a taxi to the town of Misawa, which had just become an American base for relief efforts. .
From there, we were able to drive south unhindered to reach areas that had been devastated by the tsunami. We rarely saw another television crew.
One of the first places we visited was the town of Noda. His maritime district had been razed. The multi-story buildings had collapsed. Among the rubble, soldiers in uniform were pulling at the masonry and trying to locate the bodies.
Search and rescue teams were also on the ground. Dressed uniformly in orange boiler suits, their mission to find the wounded was dwindling as hopes of finding someone alive dwindled.
On the brink of destruction, we meet a man trying to clean his house. He pulled out a tape measure to show us how the waters had risen 1.9 meters in his dining room.
Then he left, amid the stench and dirt, scooping the tsunami mud out of his house.
Despite the sadness, it was noticeable how people ‘did it for themselves’ instead of waiting for help. They seemed stoic and self-sufficient. No one seemed to want to waste time blaming the government. Parts of the city, which had not been destroyed, were trying to reopen.
For those most affected, since they had no house to clean, all they could do was pack their few belongings and leave.
Telling those stories was logistically complicated.
RTÉ’s main evening news aired at 3 am local time.
Pol and I were only able to edit our reports and go live to Misawa’s Six One News, as it was the only city that had a guaranteed power supply.
This meant driving five or six hours to the disaster area every morning, knowing that we had to get back to Misawa before midnight.
So the only way to operate was for Pol and I to sleep in the car.
One thing we quickly learned was working only with taxi drivers whose cars ran on liquefied petroleum gas.
I remember passing through the town of Hachinohe where the lines for gas were a mile and a half long, but we were able to get our LPG in minutes.
By the time we returned to Tokyo more than a week later, aftershocks had become so common that we no longer noticed them.
What did stand out, however, was the enormous public concern about radiation, an issue that was not the focus of the destroyed districts of northeastern Japan.
In Toyko, which is about 250 kilometers from the Fukushima plant, people learned that substantial amounts of radioactive material had been released into the environment three times in the five days after the tsunami.
The topic of conversation on radio and television was whether the air was polluted; whether milk or food may be contaminated; or if it was necessary to extend the 20-kilometer exclusion zone around the plant.
The reassurance provided by government officials was no longer taken at face value by the public. He had worked an assignment at Chernobyl a few years earlier and felt that the growing skepticism in Japan about the official line was probably well deserved.
For some in the capital, they simply decided to leave and escape to the south.
That exodus was very evident when he was in the huge Shinjuku station at the rush hour for lunch.
My guide said it cared for 3.6 million people a day. The day he was there, the station was almost empty.
A decade later, what do we know?
According to the World Health Organization, the tsunami killed more than 15,891 people, and another 2,579 are still missing.
Salvage work is still ongoing at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.
While tons of spent uranium fuel have been moved to safer locations, it will take years, if not decades, to remove molten reactor cores and other debris.
When I returned to Brussels from Tokyo in 2011, I called Tony Connelly to take off his jeans, boots, sweaters, coat, and backpack.
His response: “No, thank you. You can have them.”
[ad_2]