Earthquake Diary 04

Tuesday, March 15
Today we waited in line at Seiyu, the department store next to our building complex.  We waited for three hours and then they started selling stuff. The system here was that each person could buy a single prepacked bag of food and one of fresh vegetables or fruit. We telephoned my daughter and she came with my granddaughter, who counted as a person, so we were able to four allotments. We were also able to get more diapers and tissues.

I spend the afternoon watching CNN, which was showing nothing but news from Japan. After a while it started repeating itself, so I turned off the TV and read a book until supper. I frequently checked to see if my internet connection had been reestablished but to no avail.

After supper I was doing the dishes (I am the designated dish washer), when water came out of the facet. The pressure kept varying and at first it was dirty, but within half an hour or so it was clean and steady. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven - we now had both electricity and water. Civilization had returned..

In the evening my wife related the contents of a telephone call she had gotten during the day from her brother's wife. She said that her cousin, a truck driver, had been on the road in Kessennuma when the earthquake struck. He stopped and waited, and was then struck by the tsunami. Being fairly young and agile, he climbed to the roof of his truck and then jumped onto a roof that came flying by. It was quite large and already had five or six other young men on it. They soon realized that eventually the roof would run into something had they would all be thrown off, almost surely resulting in their deaths. So as the roof passed a cliff, they somehow managed to get from the roof to the cliff and then climb up to the top where they were safe.

We finally decided to sleep in our normal night clothes and in our own bed. I did take the precaution of putting a flashlight within reach, however. Still having aftershocks but they are relatively small and not particularly bothersome.