Pot luck in earthquake country
Saturday September 16th 2006
Anthony HemmensI was in bed when the earthquake struck. I woke to a deafening roar and everything bouncing around. My first thought was for my wife, Yoshiko. "Get under the futon! Get under the futon!" I screamed. "We are under the futon," she shouted back.
I didn't register fear or time or even the sound of my flat being torn apart. There was just the hollow wait for the ceiling to fall on my head and smash my bones. But that disaster never came. Eventually the shaking stopped and I got up to survey the damage.
The earthquake had made light work of destroying my possessions, but I was amazed at how selective it had been. While one corner of a room was trashed, other places looked as if nothing had happened. The kitchen was covered in smashed crockery and glass. Drawers lay in heaps with their contents piled beside them. Everything was sprawled across the floor. Yet the pictures were still hanging on the walls in perfect line.
A strange hysteria took over. "We've been hit by an earthquake," we laughed. Neighbours came on to their balconies with dustpans and brushes: "All your crockery broken too?" Chuckle, chuckle. "Treasured family heirlooms smashed into a million pieces?" What a hoot. But when evening came, the phone began ringing and we exchanged tales of terror and destruction with family, friends and colleagues.
The city fared in much the same way as my flat: the damage was not uniform. Some parts of town were wrecked while others were barely touched. In the centre the roads and pavements were buckled, cracked open or caved in. Windows were smashed, the faces of buildings had fallen off and walls were split right down the middle. But it could have been much worse.
At its epicentre the quake registered seven magnitude on the Japanese Shindo scale, reduced to six by the time it reached us. Also, it happened just before noon on Sunday, which, if you had to plan an earthquake, is exactly when you would schedule it. The city was quiet with most people at home. Breakfast was over and lunch another hour away. People weren't in the kitchen, the most dangerous place to be in an earthquake: dishes and plates can rain down on your head from the cupboards, smash on the ground and cut you up. Then there is boiling liquid that flies off the stove. It turns catastrophic when leaked gas ignites, explodes and sends flames through the entire block.
Earthquakes begin with a low growling filled with malice. This is the "P" wave. You freeze completely, the mind becomes razor sharp and you focus on just two questions - how big is this one going to be and where's the nearest cover? All this is played out in tenths of seconds. Then comes the "S" wave, the force that sends everything flying. There's nothing to do except wait it out and pray.
In Kyushu, big earthquakes don't often happen; the last one was 300 years ago. But there will always be a degree of pot luck when you live in a country that experiences 20% of the world's seismic activity. Yet nature the destroyer is also there with a helping hand. Like the shepherd's "red sky in morning", the Japanese look up and watch out for the long thin jishingumo, the earthquake cloud that spirals upward from the skyline into the stratosphere: nature's early warning system.
Walking around town a few days later was like walking through the crooked house at a funfair. The ground sloped at new and varied angles, doors slanted one way, windows leaned another.
The holes in the road have since been filled in, walls demolished and rebuilt, the rubble cleared away. In my home the broken glass has been swept up and books replaced on shelves. The earthquake has begun to fade into memory, yet every so often we are sent an aftershock, a little reminder of our fragility and how quickly our world can come tumbling down.
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