50 years of planning undone by colossal wave
She thought the town’s thick, two-storey-high harbour walls would protect against any big wave. Besides, her home was perched on a hilltop more than two kilometres from the water’s edge.
It was also just below a designated ‘tsunami refuge’ — an elevated patch of grass that looked safely down across the town’s highest four-storey buildings.
But the colossal wave that slammed into Shizugawa last week “was beyond imagination”, the high-school student said. “There was nothing we could do, but run.”
The devastating tsunami that followed Friday’s massive earthquake erased Shizugawa from the map, and raised questions about what, if anything, could have been done to prevent it.
More than half the town’s 17,000 people are missing and scenes of ruin dot the towns and villages along Japan’s northeastern coast, devastation not seen here since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War.
The official death toll from the tragedy has risen to 3,676 but is expected to climb above 10,000 as nearly 8,000 people are missing. Some 434,000 people were made homeless and are living in shelters.
With each passing day, more and more poignant stories of survivors and victims are emerging.
Immediately after the quake, Katsutaro Hamada, 79, fled to safety with his wife. But then he went back home to retrieve a photo album of his granddaughter, Saori, 14, and grandson, 10-year-old Hikaru.
Just then the tsunami came and swept away his home. Rescuers found Hamada’s body, crushed by the first floor bathroom walls. He was holding the album to his chest, Kyodo news agency reported.
“He really loved the grandchildren,” said his son, Hironobu Hamada. !
Shizugawa, 50km from Hamada’s home in Iwate province’s Ofunato city, had been preparing for just such a disaster since at least 1960, when the largest earthquake on record — a magnitude 9.5 — hit Chile and triggered a tsunami that swept across the entire Pacific Ocean and hit Japan.
A Miyagi prefecture official said the harbour walls, which began to be constructed soon after the tsunami, were completed in 1963.
Every year on the anniversary of that destruction — May 22 — residents of Shizugawa practiced tsunami drills — running to designated refuges on higher ground scattered through town as sirens howled and making arrangements for emergency food and shelter.
The drills were voluntary, but most people took part.
Now Shizugawa is an apocalyptic wasteland of knotted rubble.
