Tue, Mar 15, 2011 page5

• JAPAN DISASTER: Outrunning the tsunami: race for survival

  LOGISTICAL HEADACHE: With survivors now crowding into designated emergency shelters, the government has to find some way to provide them with food and water

  • AFP, SENDAI, JAPAN
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  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.

  

  Residents shelter in an evacuation center in Sendai city, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, -yesterday.

  Photo:AFP

  “My sister was able to get away but some people just couldn’t run fast enough,” she said,

  Otomo, whose home near Sendai was destroyed 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 said.

  Otomo is now living at an evacuation center 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 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 provided crates of supplies, and a neat row of portable toilets had been set up.

  At the entrance to the main hall, a neat arrangement of shoes was a testament to tradition, despite the disaster.

  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 on Sunday.

  However, there are no signs now of uniformed personnel — the center 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 said.

  “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.

  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 forced 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.”
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