* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
David Darg is director of International Disaster Relief and Special Projects at Operation Blessing International. The opinions expressed are his own.
The lack of sleep, the stress of the nuclear threat, the bitter cold, the lack of fuel and supplies, and the scale of the destruction are all adding up to make this one of the toughest disaster responses I have worked on.
Yesterday in the city of Shiogama, the experience was made worse by surreal scenes of destruction. A giant fishing trawler laying on its side smashed into the city fish market; a dead fish in a puddle on a residential street; and fishing nets and buoys wrapped around crooked lamp posts were all signs that something very frightening happened here.
Shiogama is a fishing community and relies heavily on its industry of tuna fishing and seaweed/oyster cultivation. Sadly that industry has been decimated. As we saw in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, so often with these deadly waves it is the fishing communities that suffer the most. At a school on high ground in the city, a volunteer named Ryuju Sasaki was caring for 250 people now living in classrooms after having their homes destroyed by the tsunami. Ryuju told me how he was at the port when the quake hit and rushed to collect his grandmother to get to higher ground. He said that many people fled to higher ground but realized they had left important items behind and returned to collect them only to be caught by the wall of water and debris.
The stunned residents were slowly returning to scan their property. Some were sifting through the wreckage of their homes searching for valuables or anything they could salvage. Sadly, there didn't seem to be much left that wasn't covered in mud. The smell of death was present near piles of wreckage; so many dead are still yet to be counted. City workers had started to clean up some of the debris to gain road access. I noticed a few spots where they had lined up antiques and valuables next to the wreckage of homes in case the owners ever came back.
We located a shelter set up in a school building. Families have moved into the classrooms and are sleeping on the floors on blankets. The school children had evacuated during the earthquake and their book bags are all still in the classrooms amongst the few possessions that the displaced families have brought with them.
Outside, some of the families were burning wood in a metal can to keep warm; a sight that I'm told is very unusual for Japan where electricity and fuel networks are widespread. The food and water we had in the van was unloaded into the school kitchen and within two hours was being served to all of the 250 people for lunch. It was a success for the OB team. We battled the lack of gas, the traffic, the empty shelves and the nuclear threat to get the supplies into the hands of the victims and it was rewarding to see that all our hard work was paying off. But in the grand scheme of things, we have so much more work to do. More than 450,000 people have been displaced by the disaster and the needs are huge.
This morning we woke up to find everything covered in a thick blanket of snow, an oddly beautiful start to what will be a difficult day. We had heard reports of a devastated area to the north that had only just been made accessible and was desperately low on supplies, especially food. Our first big challenge was to locate a place with food available to purchase. We headed up to a city called Oshu. Don has relatives there who told us that there was still food available in the shops.
As we ventured north it started snowing again—hard. At one point we were crawling along in what was almost a total whiteout. We were relieved to be heading further north away from the nuclear plant, but at one point we considered turning around to escape the snow. We pressed forward and the clouds broke, the sun came out, and the snow began to melt off. We were using the main highway, which is open only to emergency services and relief teams. The highway is a total lifeline because it is the only place to find fuel without waiting for hours and, with hardly any traffic, it makes getting up and down the disaster area much faster.
We arrived in Oshu and found a large supermarket. It was busy inside and people were definitely starting to buy up certain foods. Many of the shelves were empty, but we were fortunate that there was still a good supply of rice, so we purchased as much as we could carry in the van.
The store manager came over to investigate the commotion of two Westerners loading all their rice into carts. They were making announcements over the store PA system that customers were limited to buying 10 items only. We anticipated this and showed the manager our disaster zone access pass telling him that the rice wasn't for us but for the coastal towns. He obliged and rounded up some employees to give us a hand loading the sacks into the van.
The drive east to the coast took us up through some stunning mountains covered in snow-dusted pine trees. It was a total contrast to the horror that we were about to face. Five miles from the coastline, we rounded a bend and suddenly there was a debris field full of broken homes and cars. It was shocking because we were still in a valley, and between the ocean and us there were high mountains. This debris was from the city of Rikuzentakata where it is believed around 10,000 people were either killed or are still missing.
I have worked for Operation Blessing since 2005 and have responded to many disasters every year since then. In all my experience working in places devastated by natural disaster, I have never seen destruction like I saw in Rikuzentakata today. Thousands of homes had been disintegrated into millions of fragments of wood. The few buildings still standing were concrete structures that were engulfed in debris.
One three-story building that must have been 70-feet tall gave clues to how high the tsunami waters were. The 3rd story had been ripped through and one resident told us that people taking refuge on the roof were standing in water up to their waists! The military had just bulldozed some of the roads, leaving walls of debris 25-feet high that we walked through like a maze. The debris was a mixture of wooden homes, household items and mud, with thousands of bodies still entombed and unaccounted for.
Don Thompson and I stood in the middle of what used to be the city and were speechless. The debris field stretched as far as we could see in every direction and we couldn't even see the ocean. There were a few residents walking over the splinted piles looking for their possessions. One elderly man we spoke to had just recovered an Imperial Medal he was given by the former Prime Minister Mori. He said that he ran up the hill when he saw the roofs of other homes sweep past in the deluge. At first he thought his home had been spared, but as the waters receded they rose and carried his house back toward the ocean. I was shocked and felt uneasy just being amongst the fragments of the city.
The survivors are now living in 50 different shelters in the area. The one we were led to was a school housing over 1,000 people, many of whom were sleeping in the main auditorium. As we entered there were lists on notice boards containing the names of the people in the shelter.
Worried residents scanned the lists for any trace of their loved ones, still holding out hope that they were still alive. Many were crying. Some people had posted photos of lost relatives. One photo was of a little girl with pigtails pulling a cheeky smile. It was damaged and muddy, clearly recovered from the debris.
The leadership at the shelter were so grateful when we told them we had rice. They are feeding the 1,000 people in the shelter and 200 locals who are without food. Not only was it going to be a physical benefit to the survivors, but it was explained that it would be a comfort too. Up till now the center had only been able to provide bread in very limited amounts and this was difficult especially for the elderly who have been used to eating rice three times a day for their whole lives and who were very hungry. We had succeeded in getting their most needed supply to the shelter and they were extremely appreciative.
For the last two days the Operation Blessing team has managed to supply food and water to over 1,500 people despite all the cards being stacked against us, and as we head back to the city of Oshu tonight, we are discussing our plan of action for tomorrow. The need for kerosene is huge—the temperature is currently minus 5 and the shelters are warmed with kerosene heaters. We will be making every effort to source kerosene first thing in the morning and get it to Rikuzentakata the same day.
In the meantime, our partners in the south are very close to securing several truckloads of bottled water for the shelters in Shiogama. We have just secured much larger trucks to begin bulk delivery of rice and we are working on securing a tanker full of Kerosene.
