rescue after japanese earthquake.pdf
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msnbc.com staff and new s service reports
updated 3/13/2011 1:20:08 PM ET
A 60-year-old man was rescued two days
after he was swept miles out to sea on the roof
of his house by the huge tsunami which hit
Japan Friday, the Agence France-Presse news
agency reported.
Hiromitsu Shinkawa was plucked to safety at
12:40 p.m. local time Sunday (10:40 p.m.
Saturday ET) after he was spotted nine miles
off shore by the crew of a Maritime Self-
Defense Force destroyer, the AFP said.
Shinkawa, from the devastated city of
Minamisoma, was conscious and in "good
condition," the agency reported citing ministry
officials.
"I ran away after learning that the tsunami was
coming," Shinkawa told rescuers, AFP said,
citing Jiji Press. "But I turned back to pick up
something at home, when I was washed away.
I was rescued while I was hanging to the roof
from my house."
Other survivors caught up in the devastating
earthquake and tsunami shared harrowing
stories and their fears.
Among the voices:
Harumi Watanabe
She told the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper
that she had driven "as quickly as I could" to
her elderly parents' house in the coastal townof Shintona after the earthquake, arriving
shortly before the tsunami wave struck.
"There wasn't time to save them. They were
old and too weak to walk so I couldn't get
them in the car in time," she told the paper.
Her parents were ripped from her grasp and
dragged down by the water.
She was trapped in the house and said the
water rose up to her neck as she stood on
furniture. "There was only a narrow band of
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/Jiji Press AFP - Getty ImagesSixty-year-old survivor Hiromitsu Shinkawa waves from wreckage, as crew members of JapanMaritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF) Aegis vessel Choukai rescue him.
Man rescued from sea 9 miles off Japan coastThe 60-year-old was found clinging to his house's roof, two days after it was swept
away
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air below the ceiling. I thought I would die,"
she told The Guardian.
Ichiro Sakamoto
"Is it a dream? I just feel like I am in a movie or
something," said Sakamoto, 50, in Hitachi, acity in Ibaraki Prefecture. "Whenever I am
alone I have to pinch my cheek to check
whether it's a dream or not."
Yuko Abe
"I am looking for my parents and my older
brother," Yuko Abe, 54, said in tears in
Rikuzentakata, a nearly flattened village in far-
northern Iwate prefecture. "Seeing the way the
area is, I thought that perhaps they did not
make it....I also cannot tell my siblings that liveaway that I am safe, as mobile phones and
telephones are not working."
Satako Yusawa
She teared up as she scanned the landscape of
debris and destruction, looking at the patch of
earth where Japan's massive tsunami erased
her son's newly built house.
Despite destruction and loss, the 69-year-oldwidow said she was thankful: Her son and his f
amily were out of town when Friday's
offshore, 8.9-magnitude quake sparked huge
surges of water that washed fleets of cars,
boats and entire houses across coastal Sendai
like detritus perched on lava.
"This," she said, "is life."
Yusawa said she was having tea at a friend's
house when the main quake struck, shaking
the ground massively for more than two
horrifying minutes.
"We were desperately trying to hold the
furniture up," she said, "but the shaking was
so fierce that we just panicked."
Video: U.S. rescue teams dispatch for
Japan (on this page)
Koichi Takairin
The 34-year-old truck driver from Sendai
spent the day recounting his harrowing ordeal.
"The tsunami was unbelievably fast — cars
were swept around me. All I could do was sit
in my truck and pray," he said.
He hunkered down inside his sturdy 4-ton
truck as homes, cars, and trees swept past
him.
Hours after waters receded, Takairin said hewalked out of his wrecked truck and joined
scores of others who were as stunned by loss.
Fumiaki Yamato
The 70-year-old was inside his vacation home
in a mountain village outside of Sendai when
the temblor struck, The New York Times
reported. He was driving toward Sendai trying
to find the rest of his family when he spoke w
ith a reporter. "I’m getting worried,” he said,
adding, "I don’t know how many hours it’s
going to take." Roads were impassable.
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Lucy Craft
After the quake, the freelance correspondent
in Tokyo spent each moment trying to locate
her teenage son.
"The phone lines are still down ... I haven't been able to get in touch with him by cell
phone, I haven't been able to contact anybody
there. I have his teacher's phone number ...
the phones aren't working," Craft told CNN on
Saturday. Her son was attending a high school
near the epicenter in Sendai. "It's a very
upsetting situation, as you can imagine."
Masanori Ono
The 17-year-old watched workers wearing
white masks and protective clothing usehandheld scanners to check everyone arriving
for radiation exposure from evacuated areas
around a crippled nuclear power plant.
"There is radiation leaking out, and since the
possibility (of exposure) is high, it's quite
scary," said Masanori Ono, queuing at a center
in Koriyama city, in Fukushima prefecture.
Yohei YonekuraThe 31-year-old entrepreneur at one
emergency center, a baseball practice facility
in Koriyama, was among dozens of people
huddled under blankets and tried to sleep.
"My home is in Minami Soma and I still have
people who I haven't been able to contact and
there have been reports of the nuclear leak.
I'm really concerned about their safety."
Reiko Takagi
Like 51,000 other people around the nuclear
plant, the middle-age woman struggled to get
away.
"Everyone wants to get out of the town. But the
roads are terrible," said Takagi, standing
outside a taxi company. "It is too dangerous to
go anywhere. But we are afraid that winds may
change and bring radiation toward us."
Yoshio Miura
The 65-year-old man was in his small truckingcompany office when the rumbling started,
sending him under a table and dislodging
heavy metal cabinets.
"These cabinets fell down right on top of me,
and luckily they were stopped by this table,"
he said, gesturing across an office in
shambles, its contents strewn across the floor
by the quake and then coated in a thick layer
of grime from the tsunami.
"The shaking was mostly side to side, it was
very strong. ... Look at what it did to this
building!" He points to a large shed that was
lifted off its foundation.
Then came the water — massive waves that
swept some 6 miles inland — and chaos.
Naomi Ishizawa
The cell phone saleswoman was working whenthe quake hit in the mid afternoon. She said it
took until nightfall to reach her house just
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outside Sendai and check on her parents, who
were both OK. Their home was still standing,
but the walls of a bedroom and bathroom had
collapsed and debris was strewn throughout.
And yet, she was lucky. The tsunami's inlandmarch stopped just short of her residence;
other houses in her neighborhood were totally
destroyed.
Like many people throughout Japan's
northeast, she had not heard from others in
her family and was worried.
"My uncle and his family live in an area near
the shore where there were a lot of deaths,"
Ishizawa, 24, said. "We can't reach them."
Michiko Yamada
The 75-year-old spoke from Rikuzentakata,
where several neighborhoods were completely
swept away.
"The tsunami was black and I saw people on
cars and an old couple get swept away right in
front of me."
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed
to this report.
© 2011 msnbc.com
A look at the worst earthquakes in recorded
history, in loss of human life. (These figures do
not include the March 11, 2011, temblor off
eastern Japan, the death toll of which is still
not known.) Sources: United States Geological
Survey, Encyclopedia Britannica
Magnitude about 8, about 830,000 deaths.
This earthquake occurred in the Shaanxi
province (formerly Shensi), China, about 50
miles east-northeast of Xi'an, the capital of
Shaanxi. More than 830,000 people are
estimated to have been killed. Damage
extended as far away as about 270 miles
northeast of the epicenter, with reports as far
as Liuyang in Hunan, more than 500 miles
away. Geological effects reported with this
earthquake included ground fissures, uplift,subsidence, liquefaction and landslides. Most
towns in the damage area reported city walls
collapsed, most to all houses collapsed and
many of the towns reported ground fissures
with water gushing out.
Magnitude 7.5. Official casualty figure is
255,000 deaths. Estimated death toll as highas 655,000.
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/Keystone Getty Images1976: Workers start rebuilding work following earthquake damage in the Chinese city of Tangshan, 100 miles east of Pekin, with a wrecked train carriage behind them. (Photo byKeystone/Getty Images)
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Damage extended as far as Beijing. This is
probably the greatest death toll from an
earthquake in the last four centuries, and the
second greatest in recorded history.
Magnitude not known, about 230,000 deaths.
Contemporary accounts said the walls of
Syria’s second-largest city crumbled and
rocks cascaded into the streets. Aleppo’s
citadel collapsed, killing hundreds of
residents. Although Aleppo was the largest
community affected by the earthquake, it likely
did not suffer the worst of the damage.
European Crusaders had constructed a citadel
at nearby Harim, which was leveled by the
quake. A Muslim fort at Al-Atarib wasdestroyed as well, and several smaller towns
and manned forts were reduced to rubble. The
quake was said to have been felt as far away
as Damascus, about 220 miles to the south.
The Aleppo earthquake was the first of several
occurring between 1138 and 1139 that
devastated areas in northern Syria and
western Turkey.
Magnitude 9.1, 227,898 deaths.
This was the third largest earthquake in the
world since 1900 and the largest since the
1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska temblor. In
total, 227,898 people were killed or weremissing and presumed dead and about 1.7
million people were displaced by the
earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 14
countries in South Asia and East Africa. (In
January 2005, the death toll was 286,000. In
April 2005, Indonesia reduced its estimate for
the number missing by over 50,000.)
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/Getty Images Getty ImagesMEULABOH, INDONESIA - DECEMBER 29: In this handout photo taken from a print via theIndonesian Air Force, the scene of devastation in Meulaboh, the town cl osest to theSunday's earthquake epicentre, is pictured from the air on December 29, 2004, Meulaboh,
Aceh Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. T he western coas tal town in Aceh P rovinc e, only 60kilometres north-east of the epicentre, has been the hardest hit by sunday's underwater earthquake in the Indian Ocean. Officials expected to find at least 10,000 killed whic h wouldamount to a quarter of Meulaboh's population. Three-quarters of Sumatra's western coastwas destroyed and some towns were totally wiped out after the tsunamis that followed theearthquake. (Photo by Indonesian Air Force via Getty Images)
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Magnitude 7.0. According to official
estimates, 222,570 people killed.
According to official estimates, 300,000 were
also injured, 1.3 million displaced, 97,294
houses destroyed and 188,383 damaged in
the Port-au-Prince area and in much of
southern Haiti. This includes at least 4 people
killed by a local tsunami in the Petit Paradis
area near Leogane. Tsunami waves were also
reported at Jacmel, Les Cayes, Petit Goave,
Leogane, Luly and Anse a Galets.
Magnitude not known, about 200,000 deaths.
This earthquake struck a 200-mile stretch of
northeast Iran, with the epicenter directly
below the city of Demghan, which was at that
point the capital city. Most of the city was
destroyed as well as the neighboring areas.
Approximately 200,000 people were killed.
7.8 magnitude, about 200,000 deaths.
This earthquake brought total destruction to
the Lijunbu-Haiyuan-Ganyanchi area. Over
73,000 people were killed in Haiyuan County.
A landslide buried the village of Sujiahe in Xiji
County. More than 30,000 people were killed
in Guyuan County. Nearly all the houses
collapsed in the cities of Longde and Huining.
About 125 miles of surface faulting was seen
from Lijunbu through Ganyanchi to Jingtai.
There were large numbers of landslides and
ground cracks throughout the epicentral area.Some rivers were dammed, others changed
course.
Magnitude not known, about 150,000
deaths
The memories of the massive Damghan
earthquake (see above) had barely faded when
only 37 years later, Iran was again hit by ahuge earthquake. This time it cost 150,000
lives and destroyed the largest city in the
northwestern section of the country. The area
was again hit by a fatal earthquake in 1997.
7.9 magnitude, 142,800 deaths.
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/Jean-philippe Ksiazek AFP/ Get ty ImagesHaitians walk through collapsed buildings near the iron market in Port-au-Prince on Januar 31, 2010. Quake-hit Haiti will need at least a decade of painstaking reconstruction, aidchiefs and donor nations warned, as homeless, scarred survivors struggled today to rebuildtheir lives. AFP PHOTO / JEAN-PHILIPPE K SIAZEK (Photo credit should read JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP/Getty Images)
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This earthquake brought extreme destruction
in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, both from thetemblor and subsequent firestorms, which
burned about 381,000 of the more than
694,000 houses that were partially or
completely destroyed. Although often known
as the Great Tokyo Earthquake (or the Great
Tokyo Fire), the damage was most severe in
Yokohama. Nearly 6 feet of permanent uplift
was observed on the north shore of Sagami
Bay and horizontal displacements of as much
as 15 feet were measured on the BosoPeninsula.
7.3 magnitude, 110,000 deaths.
This quake brought extreme damage in
Ashgabat (Ashkhabad) and nearby villages,
where almost all the brick buildings collapsed,
concrete structures were heavily damaged and
freight trains were derailed. Damage and
casualties also occurred in the Darreh Gaz
area in neighboring Iran. Surface rupture was
observed both northwest and southeast of
Ashgabat. Many sources list the casualty total
at 10,000, but a news release from the newly
independent government on Dec. 9, 1988,
advised that the correct death toll was
110,000. (Turkmenistan had been part of the
Soviet Union, which tended to downplay the
death tolls from man-made and natural
disasters.)
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/Hulton Archive Gett y Images1923: High-angle view of earthquake and fire damage on Hongokucho Street and the KandaDistrict, taken from the Yamaguchi Bank building after the Kanto earthquake, Tokyo, Japan.(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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