Outrunning the tsunami:
Race for survival
Japanese tsunami survivors who were able to outrun the killer waves
that raged out of the sea, have recalled how they saw those behind them
consumed by the torrent of mud and debris.
Miki Otomo’s sister was one of the fortunate, though the image of
victims violently swept away last week by the black tide of wrecked
houses and cars near the hard-hit city of Sendai will be forever seared
in her memory.
“My older sister was in a bus when the wave came behind them. The bus
driver told everybody to get out of the bus and run,” said Otomo, a
mother of three teens who herself managed to escape the deadly wall of
water in her car.
“My sister was able to get away but some people just couldn’t run
fast enough,” she said, adding they were engulfed by the swirling
tsunami, which was sparked Friday by a massive earthquake, the biggest
ever recorded in Japan.
Otomo, whose home near Sendai was destroyed in the twin disasters,
says she quickly piled her father and her dog in the car in a desperate
bid to survive.
She is thankful that her entire family was able to escape the waves.
“The tsunami wave was coming and I grabbed grandfather and our dog
and drove.
The wave was right behind me, but I had to keep zigzagging around
obstacles and the water to get to safety,” Otomo told AFP.
Otomo is now living at an evacuation centre in an area school with
about 1,000 other exhausted survivors who cheated death. Authorities
fear that at least 10,000 people may have lost their lives. In the
gymnasium at the Rokugo junior high school, more than 100 people huddled
in blankets on the floor as emergency food supplies were brought in.
Outside in the car park, a water pump manned by volunteers provides a
much-needed source of refreshment, local business owners arrive with
crates of supplies, and a neat row of portable toilets has been set up.
At the entrance to the main hall, a neat arrangement of shoes is a
testament to tradition, despite the disaster.
The atmosphere is strikingly calm, orderly and determined.
Maki Kobari, an English teacher, said she and her colleagues at the
school - a designated emergency shelter - raced to help shortly after
the tsunami hit. They spent the first night after the catastrophe in the
classrooms with only a few crackers between them, trying to organize
some kind of response until officials arrived early Sunday.
But there are no signs now of uniformed personnel - the centre is
manned by teams of volunteers who help distribute supplies. Across the
street, people queue calmly with their jerrycans for petrol.
Some people are still too shocked to express the terror of their
ordeal, let alone face the uncertainty of their future, Kobari
explained.
“Some people lost their whole families, they lost everything,” she
said.
Apart from a violent fissure in the car park, there are shockingly
few visible signs of the utter devastation less than a mile away, where
the once suburban landscape is empty and eerily silent.
Cars were tossed across the muddy wasteland like dice - one was
awkwardly balanced on top of another, while around five vehicles had
washed up within the walls of a house compound.
The roof of one house, apparently shorn from the building, lay on the
waterlogged ground. A fridge and a sofa also were pitched incongruously
in the mud.
Groups of emergency crews in orange jumpsuits picked through the vast
fields of rubble. Army trucks and police rescue vehicles drove into the
disaster zone, although tsunami warnings pushed them back at least twice
on Sunday.
Farmer Yoichi Aizawa, 84, said he had briefly returned to his house
to retrieve some of his belongings, but cannot imagine when - or if - he
will be able to go home again.
“When the earthquake occurred, the house was OK so I thought it was
going to be alright,” he said.
“But when the waves came, that was unexpected. The wave was the most
scary thing.”
The Dawn
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