![]() Endo was rescued 23 hours later.Īnyone who walks through Minamisanriku today sees a Pompeii on the Pacific, with the evidence of a lost era appearing in every nook and corner. Only ten out of the forty people who were with him on the roof survived. He tried "not to breathe underwater for one to two minutes," says the deputy mayor. ![]() Endo survived by holding onto a banister when the wave came. Amateur videos show the 24-year-old, recently married employee, speaking steadfastly and forcefully, as she urged her fellow citizens to run uphill - and continuing to do so as the wave of grayish-black water was already rushing over houses and cars and the mayor and deputy mayor were running up the stairs to the roof. "Miki was using the public address system on the third floor to issue the tsunami warning," says Endo. They included Endo, the mayor and a young woman named Miki, who died trying to save others. Immediately after the earthquake warning was issued, about three dozen people fled to the building, which housed the local emergency management office. He takes his jacket from a hook on the wall and says: "Let's take a drive down there."Ī rusted brown, three-story steel frame in the middle of the field of debris is all that remains of the building where Endo survived by climbing up to the roof. Everything was far worse this time, he says, and it was almost a miracle that he survived. Kenji Endo was 12 when he witnessed the 1960 tsunami. The only privacy they have consists of 30-centimeter (10-inch) cardboard dividers surrounding the four to five square meters (43-54 square feet) of floor space each family is allotted. The more than 1,000 evacuees being housed in the nearby arena need food, clothing and medical care. From here, he organizes the search for the missing and attends to the needs of survivors. Kenji Endo, the deputy mayor, is sitting in a container, his temporary office, up on a hill near the Bayside Arena. By destroying paper records and computer files, and the registers of births and deaths, the tsunami also wiped out the memory of this city. The full scope and reality of the disaster only emerges bit by bit. Two-thirds of the survivors are homeless. About 1,000 residents have already been reported dead or missing. Until March 11, 2011, Minamisanriku had a population of 18,000 people. Plumes of smoke waft over a vast, sea-level wasteland covered with tree trunks stacked like Mikado sticks, houses that were pushed inland like toy blocks, and upended ships that look like whales stranded on a pile of debris stretching to the Pacific. In Minamisanriku, farther down along the Pacific coast, the Japanese satellite navigation system in our car indicates streets and buildings of a city that no longer exists. Few are willing to buy vegetables from the region these days. Rice fields gave been obliterated, and even 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, cabbages and spinach are rotting in warehouses. Some 24,000 hectares (about 59,000 acres) of agricultural land were flushed away. The foothills acted as a buffer, preventing the deadly wave from going farther inland. When the tsunami came, it descended on these towns like a hurricane, flattening them as if they consisted of houses of cards. ![]() Set against a backdrop of foothills, the towns in the region are spread out on flat coastal strips of land. They don't allow themselves to cry.Īnyone who travels north along the coast from Fukushima, through a rural area that many in the highly developed south regard as backward, will encounter a swath of destruction in almost every bay along hundreds of kilometers of coastline. ![]() SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappenĪ few steps from the spot where the Kumagai family's house stood near the fishing port, an old woman is still searching for her husband in the wreckage, while her son digs family photos out of the sand.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |