Earthquake Diary

I started writing this on Tuesday, March 15, and have been making daily entries since then. For now I will post the entry that I wrote for the day of the earthquake and then as I have time I will post the following entries and the pictures that I have been taking. I am not going to try to coordinate the pictures with the diary, but will post short comments with each picture explaining what they are.

Friday, March 11, 2011
In the morning I decided to go to the other side of Sendai to buy cheesecake at a newly opened shop. My daughter Naomi and granddaughter Tomone have arrived a couple of days earlier and I wanted them to try the cakes. The shop is a one-man operation where the master uses various cheeses as flavoring, in addition to the usual cream cheese. (I have been blogging about a previous trip to the store and will return to that after I finish all the news about the earthquake, whenever that is.) Anyway, I left home about 9:30. The one-way trip takes more than an hour (a 15 minute walk to the subway, half an hour sitting on the train, and then a 20 minute walk to the shop). I bought the cheesecake and returned home about 11:30. We had an early lunch at Kabo (Chinese Table in Japanese), our local Chinese restaurant, and then went to an AU Shop (cell phone store) to replace my wife's cell phone which was on its last legs. We got her new phone and returned home. My wife and I settled down on the sofa in the living to watch an installment of NCIS and the kids went to their room.

At about 2:45 my wife's new phone came to life and broadcast an earthquake warning (a feature on most new cell phones), so we sat there knowing that in a few seconds we would feel a quake. We were not too worried because earthquakes are a way of life here. However, when it started, it was huge and just went on and on and on ...  Because our building is built on springs to cushion the shock of earthquakes, nothing was damaged. Some pictures fell off the wall, a few loose items flew off the tops of things, and cabinet doors flopped around. Because it was so strong, I immediately changed the TV to NHK (the national channel) and saw the location of the quake - directly east of Sendai - and the first estimate of the magnitude - 7.4. Then the TV went blank.

The only time I have experienced more violent shaking was when we moved to Japan in 1976. We flew from Boston to New York to catch a connecting flight to Japan. Because of the short distance, the plane could not gain any altitude, so we had to fly all the way in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. That was worse than the quake, but only because the movements were larger.

As soon as it seemed safe to stand up, we checked on the kids. They were okay. then we confirmed that the electricity was off, which is very unusual. We still had water and gas, but no electricity. The water in our building comes from a tank on the roof and it serves as a damper of the vibrations during earthquakes, but the water gets to the tank by electric pump. Since there was no electricity, we know that once the tank was empty there would be no water until the electricity was restored. We also turned on one of our two battery operated radios and learned that there was a huge amount of damage and that the magnitude had been upgraded to 8.0. The announcer also said that, on the Japanese system that ranks shaking on the ground, not the energy of the quake itself, Sendai had had a quake of the highest rank. This meant that the electricity might be off for a while, so we immediately started filling every container we could find with water: pots and pans, plastic bottles and buckets, even the bath tub. We still had gas, so my wife heated enough water to fill all the thermoses that we have.

About this time we looked down from our balcony and saw that the ground below had cracked open and that there was damage all around the base of the building. Once things were under control in our apartment and the aftershocks had quieted down a bit, I went out and walked around our building, taking pictures of the damage. The entrance to our building had moved substantially and some pieces had fallen off the ceiling. The building itself did not seem damaged.

My cell phone has a built-in TV so I watched some the NHK coverage of the tsunami. It was far beyond words. The others in the family could not comprehend the extent of the damage until days later when the TV was operating again. I am sure that you, the reader, have seen better coverage of the damage than we have. My cell phone soon ran out of electricity and, with no place to charge it, I had to give up. There were some reports that referred to 200 hundred dead in one small village. We assumed that it must be a mistake.

My wife soon found the hand-cranked generating device that we have. It has a light, radio, and cell phone charger. However, it is old and the radio did not work, the light only worked while you were cranking, and the charger apparently ruined my cell phone.

There were constant aftershocks all day. I heard on the radio that there were more than 200 quakes with a magnitude of more than 5.0. There seemed to be quakes everywhere on Honshu, the main island. Everyone we met was talking about an old movie - Nihon Shinbotsu (Sinking of Japan), in which Japan recedes back into the sea from which the old folk tales say it arose.

My wife and daughter spent a lot of time trying to get through to friends and relatives but the phone lines were either not working or busy.

During the afternoon, the people in the administrative building for our compound gave out bottled water, biscuits, and honey from the emergency stores.

We heard on the radio that, as they came back on line, all public telephones would be free and that banks of free phones would be installed in the evacuation centers. At the same time, they would install power points so that people could recharge their cell phones, again for free.

We exchanged information with the neighbors, discovering that everyone from the 4th to 13th floors decided to spend the night in the disaster center in the grade school gym that is a few hundred meters from our building. One of the reasons was the swaying from the aftershocks, which was really bad on the upper floors especially with no water in the tanks, and another was that the elevators were stopped so people had to climb the stairs.  As it started to get dark, we made supper and ate early. The gas was still working so we had a hot meal, cooking very carefully between aftershocks so that no one would be burned.

Our bedroom is on the north side of the building and very cold, so we decided to sleep in the south side living room. My wife put down some mattresses and slept on the floor. I put a mattress on a reclining chair and slept under a layer of blankets. We did not sleep very much because of the after shocks.