Japan, 2:46 pm, March 11, 2011

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO
March Fianza


Mayor Jin Sato of Minamisanriku, a quiet fishing community in Japan, just finished talking to the town assembly about increasing tsunami awareness when the M8.9 earthquake hit the area at 2:46 PM, Friday last week (March 11, 2011).

A little over half an hour, 30 to 60 feet high tsunami waves flowed through this town of 17,000 residents. Government officials say the ocean could have swallowed around 10,000 people that included even those who reached higher elevations.

In Otsuchi, a fishing town in Iwate Prefecture on the northeastern part of Japan, the Red Cross reported that around 9,000 people that is more than half the town’s population perished.

These are a few of thousands of images brought to us through TV news broadcast. For those who do not have access to live TV broadcast and so are also unable to visualize what tsunamis can do to communities, let me share a list of the number of persons – missing or killed, as of last Thursday, that I got from CATDAT (Catastrophe Database) Earthquake Report.

CATDAT (Catastrophe Database) estimated loss after Japan tsunami: US$100 billion plus; evacuation numbers as of 4pm, Tuesday (March 15, 2011): Iwate Prefecture – 51,553 people – more than 345 locations; Gunma Prefecture –23,046 people –284 places; Aomori Prefecture – 20 places – 439 people; Fukushima Prefecture – 446 places – 131,665 people;

Tochigi Prefecture – 149 places – 9,530 people; Miyagi Prefecture -1227 places – 222,479 people; Ibaraki Prefecture – 217 places – 12,347 people; Niigata Prefecture – 4 places – 253 people; Yamagata Prefecture – 44 places – 1,253 people.

This recent release shows approximately 453,000 people have evacuated.
The current official toll is of 3771 people killed and 8181 missing – approximately 12,000 people.

At least 1.6 million families are still without water (320,000 families in Fukushima Prefecture, 290,000 families in Miyagi, 110,000 families in Iwate, and 670,000 families in Ibaraki).

The north-eastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu, called Sanriku, has experienced four destructive tsunamis in the last 115 years, and with more loss of life than any tsunami-prone region in Japan or perhaps the world.

Huge numbers of people are still missing (much more than the official statistics). The receding waves did pull a lot of people in the ocean. Those drowned people are being gradually returned by the Ocean. Various reports from rescuers are stating that a lot of bodies are being found on the beaches.

Search and rescue personnel from at least 10 countries are beginning search and rescue operations in the affected zones. The Search and Rescue teams who arrived today are coming from USA, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, China, New Zealand, Britain, Australia and Mexico.

Some 2,000 bodies have been found on two shores in Miyagi prefecture. About 1,000 bodies were found coming ashore on Miyagi’s Ojika Peninsula and another 1,000 are in the town of Minamisanriku, where the prefectural government has been unable to contact about 9,500 people, or about 60% of the local population.

Nearly 600,000 people have been temporarily relocated in 2,000 shelters. Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan held a policy meeting that has vowed to provide ample liquidity to financial the system. It has extended a total of 55 billion Yen to 13 financial institutions in the quake-struck north-east of Japan since Saturday.

The earthquake triggered a tsunami up to 10 meters. Waves swept away homes, crops, vehicles and submerged farmland.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says radiation levels at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have risen above the safety limit but says this posed no “immediate threat” to human health. An explosion blew the roof off at reactor No. 1.

Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano says there is the risk of an explosion at another building housing the No. 3 reactor, although this is unlikely to affect the reactor’s core container.
Authorities have set up a 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and a 10km zone around another nuclear facility close by.

Almost 2 million households are still without power – with possibly more.
The Nuclear safety agency rates the incident a 4 on the 1 to 7 International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, less serious than Three Mile Island, which was a 5, and Chernobyl at 7.

Around 2,500 tourists visiting the hardest hit tsunami and earthquakes areas are still unaccounted for while 1,600 tourists have been confirmed as safe. Among the missing were mainly Japanese tourists but also people from many other countries.

More than 80,000 people living near the Fukushima Nuclear Plants were told to evacuate. The news agency reported Tuesday that the new death toll marks the first time since 1923, when the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, that a natural disaster has killed more than 10,000 people in Japan.

However, some incredible stories of survival are still emerging from Japan, and about 25,000 people have been rescued. On Tuesday a man in his 20s was pulled alive from the rubble, 94 hours after the quake, after a two-storey house collapsed around him.

Two hours later a 75-year-old woman was rescued, suffering from hypothermia but otherwise uninjured. The stories of hope following the devastation are far outweighed by the mounting death toll, however.

Hundreds, if not thousands of bodies have been washing up on Japan's northeast coast, many of them still unidentified. The total death toll is expected to rise to 10,000. And four days after the earthquake and tsunami, it's believed that 6,000 people are still without shelter, food, water and heat -- many of them in isolated areas still entirely cut off from the outside world.

Around 1,300 people were found on the island of Oshima, in Miyagi prefecture, Kyodo News reported. Another 7,000 to 8,000 people had taken shelter in schools but had still not received any supplies.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan called it the greatest crisis the country has faced since the Second World War. Authorities were also running out of coffins to bury the dead. In Fukushima prefecture, officials say the town of Soma’s local crematorium was unable to handle the large number of bodies.

Friday's earthquake has also left millions with little food or shelter, as temperatures drop to near-freezing levels overnight. Hospitals are overwhelmed with the injured and running out of medicine and supplies.

Indonesian geologist Hery Harjono said Japan's death-toll projection was too conservative. He said, it would be “a miracle really if it turns out to be less than 10,000.”
He noted that many victims may have been swallowed by the sea as what has happened when the 2004 tsunami struck Aceh Province, Indonesia where about 230,000 people died but only 184,000 bodies were ever found. – marchfianza777@yahoo.com