"Japan marks 10th anniversary of Fukushima nuclear disaster" PBS NewsHour 3/11/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Japan on Thursday marked another grim anniversary: 10 years since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the nation's coast triggered a 130-foot-high tsunami that crashed ashore at more than 500 miles per hour. It killed thousands and triggered a nuclear disaster at a plant in Fukushima. Nick Schifrin looks at that nuclear explosion in detail, and Grace Lee reports from Tokyo on the quake's aftermath.
In the small fishing and logging community of Ocosta, Washington, residents are doing something about an invisible danger lurking just miles off their coastline — one of the most dangerous seismic faults in the world. The community agreed to raise local taxes to build North America’s first vertical tsunami evacuation shelter atop the local school’s new gymnasium. It will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can hold up to 2,000 people in the event of an earthquake and tsunami that follows. After the quake hits, residents will only have between 15 and 25 minutes to get there before the tsunami arrives on their shores.
But how real is the threat? The Cascadia fault sits just offshore, stretching 700 miles from Vancouver Island in Canada to northern California. Scientists have calculated it’s overdue for a rupture and the likelihood of a large quake happening in the next 50 years is 37 percent. FEMA estimates the number of people killed in a major quake and tsunami could reach 13,000 with a further 20,000 injured; 140,000 square miles would be affected.
The superintendent of schools in Ocosta, Paula Akerlund, said the 2011 tsunami in Japan guided their construction project. “One of the things that we knew from Japan is that some buildings were overtopped. So we tried to make the wall here high enough and then also I think it will serve another purpose because there will be children up here with us and they won’t really see what’s happening for awhile.”
The tsunami shelter is ready for use now with a ribbon cutting ceremony scheduled in June.
Farther up the Washington coast, the Quinault Indian Nation village of Taholah sits at the edge of the Pacific, only 6 feet above sea level. To combat the tsunami threat and rising sea levels the tribe has a five-year plan to move to higher ground. It’s a place the Quinault have lived for centuries and tribe president Fawn Sharp says, “Our membership sees the exciting opportunity of creating a new village and what that might look like. But so many of our memories are here in this village and the thought of it being under water, you know, there’s a lot of trauma to that prospect that a very sacred site could no longer exist.”
From transcript:
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): The highly reinforced structure they have built isn’t just to protect the 620 students at the school. The roof can hold nearly 2,000 people, and officials say no one would be turned away in a disaster, and the shelter will be accessible 24/7 from this point forward.
The total cost? Just over $2 million. And get this: No state or federal money was used to build it. Locals had to vote on a bond specifically to raise their own taxes to build this, and this isn’t a wealthy community.
KIRA KAY (NewsHour): On a Sunday morning, the villagers of Lampuuk gather for a feast, celebrating the start of the harvest season. But Lampuuk is also celebrating the life that has returned to it, a decade after a wall of water swept the village away.
Misran Yusuf is the village’s imam. He recalls a scene eerily like this one on December 26, 2004.
MISRAN YUSUF (through interpreter): There was a wedding that day. We were preparing food, and, all of a sudden, an earthquake hit. It was so strong, people fell. We had no idea that the seawater would rise. We had never heard of a tsunami.
KIRA KAY: The quake that hit offshore was a 9.1 on the magnitude scale. Within 20 minutes, waves 60 feet high hit the region at hundreds of miles per hour.
MISRAN YUSUF (through translator): It sounded like thunder. I held my breath and the water came over the rooftops. When I surfaced, I saw people clinging to a tree trunk. They pulled me on board and we floated until we reached the next village.
KIRA KAY: One hundred and thirty thousand people died, and whole communities vanished. Lampuuk’s lone standing mosque became an iconic image of the disaster. Ten years later, it is hard to picture that destruction on the streets of the capital city, Banda Aceh.
The once shattered downtown is now firmly back in business. The riverside, choked with debris, is a thriving waterfront again. People overall seem happy. The tsunami had carved a new shoreline, disappearing whole blocks of the community of Ulee Lee. But now it is a favorite beach destination for families. Only small hints remain of what happened here.
Mayor Illiza Sa’aduddin says the region has built back better.
MAYOR ILLIZA SA’ADUDDIN DJAMAL, Banda Aceh, Indonesia (through interpreter): The economy has improved. Our poverty level has decreased to a rate that is below the national average. Our infrastructure is better than even before the tsunami. Roads are now reaching remote villages. There are a lot of lessons that Aceh can share about how we got back on our feet and how we were able to cooperate with many institutions.
JEFFREY BROWN: And next to Japan, where the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been leaking contaminated underground water into the sea more than two years after the earthquake and tsunami.
Today, officials at Tokyo Electric Power admitted they delayed releasing that information, saying they didn't want to worry the public. Meanwhile, the area around the plant remains deserted.
But Alex Thomson of Independent Television News got brief and rare access.
ALEX THOMSON: Few people ever get in to the Fukushima exclusion zone. Nobody gets in without protective equipment and screening.
Here's the radio to keep in contact, she's telling us. Monitoring equipment for radioactivity comes next, then off, out to the final police checkpoint. And we pull in just inside the exclusion zone to suit up.
It's becoming a way of life around here. TEPCO, the company that runs the stricken plant, have given us five hours in the zone with a radio to keep in contact with us, let us know when our time's up. The regalia in which I'm now standing, including this, a dosimeter which will give my accumulated radiation dose across the time that we're inside the exclusion zone.
We have come here with Anthony Ballard, who used to live in Futaba, the town which houses the giant nuclear plant, as did his friend and fellow English teacher Philip Jellyman. Rubble from the quake stays just where it fell, fringed now with weeds. The clock on the main street stopped at 2:46, the second the first tremors shattered this region on March the 11th, 2011.
The town shrine lurches after the quake. Someone's been back at some point to try and save it with ropes. Good luck messages to the gods for the unluckiest of towns after a quake, a tsunami, and radiation.
MAN: The students who were at the school that day have never seen their houses.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ..... A Japanese town aims for a comeback two years after the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima reactor.
Our story comes from special correspondent Emily Taguchi, a graduate of the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, one of our reporting partners.
EMILY TAGUCHI: It's been two years since the meltdowns at the Daiichi nuclear power plant. The city of Minamisoma is celebrating the Nomaoi festival, showcasing their heritage as horsemen and warriors.
About a third of the city is still uninhabitable. But, on this day, residents who fled the city return, standing shoulder to shoulder with former neighbors to honor their history.
MAYOR KATSUNOBU SAKURAI, Minamisoma, Japan: I'm Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai of Minamisoma. This year's Nomaoi festival, in the hopes of recovery for our residents affected by the nuclear crisis, is being held per the custom.
EMILY TAGUCHI: At 20 miles north of the Daiichi plant, Minamisoma was cut off from the rest of the world two years ago by radioactive plumes. Not even aid trucks would come near. Mayor Sakurai uploaded a plea for help (Japanese with English captions) on YouTube.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): ..... Monday marks two years since a devastating tsunami hit Japan. We take a look back through the words of a writer.
Gretel Ehrlich is best known for her nature and travel writing. She's authored 13 books, including three of poetry.
It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, triggering a tsunami that reached over 130 feet, taking close to 16,000 lives and causing the meltdown of three nuclear reactors, a disaster of epic proportions.
Beginning in the 1960s, Gretel Ehrlich began visiting Japan regularly to study and write about its culture, its religion -- she's a practicing Buddhist -- and its literature. Soon after the tsunami, she returned for the first of three trips to document the physical and emotional aftermath.
There is no doubting the people of Sumatra are alive to the risks of earthquakes and the possibility of a tsunami.
News video of panic and shock emerging from Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and largest city in the island's northern province, spoke volumes.
Memories of the big quake in December 2004 (magnitude 9.1) are still raw.
Wednesday's major tremor (M8.7) occurred in a similar location, several hundred km offshore and at a depth of 23km, at 15:38 local time (08:38 GMT). It was followed by an aftershock of M8.2 just a couple of hours later.
Tsunami alerts were issued for the entire Indian Ocean basin but, mercifully, the scale of the wave action appears to have been small - on the order of about 80cm (31in) in height.
"Our tide gauges and buoys recorded small tsunamis," Said Kristiawan, of Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said.
Underwater landslide
Geologists reported quickly that the quake was "predominantly strike-slip" - that is to say, the movement of rock at the site of fracture was horizontal in nature.
"Tsunami can be caused in a number of ways, but typically it is where the seafloor can be moved vertically, and that displaces a large amount of water that travels outward from that source toward land," observed Bruce Pressgrave, from the US Geological Survey (USGS).
"One of the ways that strike-slip earthquakes can cause tsunami is if the shaking itself causes some kind of underwater landslide that then produces the movement in the water column," he told BBC News.
Nonetheless, the alerts stayed in place for several hours as the authorities attempted to get on top of the latest information, and there is now a lot more of it.
This is one of the big changes since 2004. There is now a tsunami monitoring system dedicated to the Indian Ocean, put in place through the leadership of [UN scientific agency] Unesco in 2006.
Pressure sensors on the ocean floor detect anomalous behaviour in the water column and signal that information to surface buoys, which then relay the data, via satellite, to onshore control centers.
The system is much needed, particularly in Indonesia. Its Sumatra island lies close to an active subduction zone, where the Indian-Australian tectonic plate presses into and under the Eurasian plate.
This monumental collision is evident on the ocean floor by a huge depression known as the Sunda Trench.
The slab of cold, dense rock that descends into the Earth at this point gets stuck, and strain builds up that has to be released at some point in the form of an earthquake.
"The Sunda trench region is highly active," commented Dr Susanne Sargeant, from British Geological Survey.
"Earthquakes here are related to subduction of the Indian plate beneath Eurasia. Today's earthquake occurred on a structure related to the subduction that is occurring here. The tectonics of the region are complex and large earthquakes are relatively frequent. The aftershock sequence has started and this includes an earthquake of magnitude 8.3."
To put these magnitudes in context: one would expect about two or three quakes a year greater than M8.0 to occur somewhere on Earth. On Wednesday, they had a pair of big ones off the coast of Sumatra.
We await the full impact of these events; power outages mean it will be sometime before the authorities get a complete picture of what happened.
But if there are positives to be drawn, they are that the warning systems and building regulations introduced in recent years will have been extensively tested. Citizens also will have been reminded of the safety actions they must take in the event of big tremors.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): And to a very different kind of science story: how researchers in Japan are trying to limit the most catastrophic damage from a tsunami.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien files the last of three reports from Japan.
MILES O'BRIEN: Yoshiko Kiuchi (ph) remembers March 11, 2011, as if it were yesterday.
"We got a warning that tsunami would come in two minutes," she told me. "So, we escaped by car in a rush, literally with little more than the clothes on our back."
Her home and her neighborhood in the coastal town of Arahama are gone, pressure-washed by the epic tsunami. She lives in temporary housing now, but comes back here regularly to gather what she can out of what remains of her garden.
"I will take these flowers to my temporary house," she said. "I will plant them in the planter there."
Nearby, there is plenty of evidence the Japanese are working hard to clean up and rebuild. But how? The tsunami, not the earthquake, is linked to nearly all the 20,000 deaths here. And building coastal towns that can repel giant waves is not easy or cheap.
That is what they are working on here at the Port and Airport Research Institute about fifty miles south of Tokyo. It was open house day when we were here, a chance for people to see and feel how powerful even a scaled-down version of a tsunami can be. But it is not just for show.
The emergency appeared to be the worst involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. The developments at two separate nuclear plants prompted the evacuation of more than 200,000 people. Japanese officials said they had also ordered up the largest mobilization of their Self-Defense Forces since World War II to assist in the relief effort.
On Monday, an explosion blew the roof off the second reactor, not damaging the core, officials said, but presumably leaking more radiation.
