Thankfully, my city was virtually unscathed - 300km north things people were much less fortunate.
March 11, 2011 – Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan: It was a boring Friday afternoon, much like any other – with one big exception: I had no classes. The eleventh grade teachers were waxing the floors on the third story of one of the school buildings.
The shaking started slowly, barely imperceptible at first, but after a minute or so there was no mistaking what was happening. We were in the midst of an earthquake that was growing progressively more powerful. It was a strange sensation – that anyone who has spent any length of time surfing would immediately recognize. When you are sitting out the back on your board, beyond the breakers, and wave after wave passes under you; each one a little bigger than the last.
We made the decision to evacuate even before the order came over the PA system. The order came via the vice principal, who stayed in the office, in harm’s way, coordinating the evacuation throughout the entire quake.
The last major earthquake to strike the Yamanashi prefecture occurred about 150 years ago. At that time, 30% of the homes in the city of Kofu were destroyed. Tokai-region earthquakes occur every 100-150 years, so it was in the back of my mind that this could, in fact, be it. As I reached the ground floor and cleared the area that was at risk of falling glass – the earthquake subsided.
We would soon learn that we had been hit with a magnitude 5 earthquake. A look around the streets told as us much anyway. Magnitude 6 is usually when bad things start to happen; all the houses on the street were standing. One house in the prefecture collapsed, a few windows were broken at a culture hall, other than that any damage was cosmetic – a crack in a wall here or there – nothing that insurance can’t fix.
We watched the tsunami footage on television and saw the devastation throughout Miyagi and Fukushima. The scope of the disaster was not apparent, but 10-meter walls of water don’t take prisoners – and it was not hard to imagine that some of the cars and houses that we saw being thrown about like children’s toys had people in them.
Early reports indicated that several hundred people were dead and that up to 1,000 were missing. It seemed like an underestimation. The initial earthquake was followed by a single weaker aftershock. People closer to the epicenter experienced countless aftershocks that were strong enough to do damage on their own – let alone after an earthquake that would later be upgraded to magnitude 9.
To be continued. [Images: ABC, NY Times]
