130 foot waves. A nuclear disaster. Comparing Japan's 2011 tsunami to today's
A massive tsunami generated by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck Japan's coast within 30 minutes. Waves as high as 130 feet spilled over seawalls. Within days, three nuclear reactors were disabled.
More than 20,000 people died, including several thousand victims whose remains were never recovered. A further 400,000 people were impacted, their homes and livelihoods and memories washed away. The resulting damage cost an estimated $220 billion − one of the most expensive natural disasters in human history.
On July 30, Japan appears to have mercifully avoided the fate it suffered on March 11, 2011, in what is often referred as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.
Modest tsunami waves did reach the West Coast of the United States after a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck off Russia's eastern coast. The earthquake was powerful. One of the strongest ever recorded. The Klyuchevskoy volcano on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east erupted, Russian state news agency RIA reported.
Almost two million people had been told to evacuate in Japan. But within hours tsunami warnings in Japan − as well as in Russia and Hawaii − were downgraded, though warnings and advisories were still in place for much of the Pacific Ocean. Alerts were issued in China, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile and Mexico.
Still, earlier, as Japan waited to see what the impact of this latest tsnumani was going to be, media reports in the country said the nation was on edge but prepared. The Japan Times reported that towns, villages and nuclear reactors, including the Fukushima Daiichi plant, site of 2011's nuclear disaster, were evacuated. Airports shut while office workers rushed to higher floors in coastal cities. Residents inland, the media outlet said, largey went about their business, while the more vulnerable coastal areas quickly implemented long-planned measures.
The warnings resurfaced memories of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, when many residents were unable to reach higher ground in time as surging waters from waves engulfed much of the country's northeastern coast.
On July 30, residents recalled those events.
"I was at the same post office 14 years ago," a male postal office worker in Iwate prefecture told NHK, Japan's public broadcaster. "This time, all of us said 'let's evacuate quickly.'"
The U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday's earthquake was relatively shallow. It struck at a depth of about 12 miles southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, in eastern Russia. And, in the end, the biggest waves to hit Japan measured about 4 feet, according to Japan's Meteorological Agency. That's six feet less than was forecast.
One person died.
A 58-year-old woman was killed when her car went off a cliff while she was trying to leave a coastal area. She was on her way, local media reported, to an evacuation site when her car fell from a height of about 100 feet on a national highway in Homo Town, Kumano City, about 60 miles south of Osaka and Kyoto.