Wednesday, 9 March 2011 started much like any other day so far that year.
Then Wham! The world moved sideways. There hadn’t been a sizable
earthquake for a while and the building didn’t seem like it was enjoying it at
all. Everything was over in a few seconds and I was glad that we weren’t any
closer to the origin. We switched on the news and saw that the center was some
350 kilometers north from Tokyo off the coast of Sendai, the main city in
Tohoku, northeast Japan. That’s what Tohoku means, northeast.
The catastrophe didn’t actually
start for me on 11 March, 2011. It began here two days before at 1.54pm on
March 9 when this M7.2 earthquake struck off the coast. Unbeknownst to us this
foreshock was forty kilometers from where we were going to see the earth stretch
and shatter two days later.
The shock was enough to rattle
us and certainly got our attention. We had friends in Tohoku and as soon as we
realized where it was we contacted them just to check everyone was alright. We
also reached out to the stores we had in the area and confirmed all was OK
there too.
Paul had been on the street when
it happened and hadn’t felt anything, the shaking being masked by the rumble of
heavy traffic. Asking about Xebio, a customer located in Koriyama, near the
epicenter, I said to him “can’t hurt just to drop a note and ask if they need
any help”. The reply we received was “thanks, all OK here, just a bit shaken”.
And then life carried on.
What we didn’t know at this
point was how our lives were about to change. The innocence of those two days
now seems somewhat surreal. What was to come would see five minutes of extreme
violence. Japan would move twenty meters closer to America, the coast subsiding
and accelerating the giant wave that was generated as 500 kilometers of seabed
ruptured creating a sound that could be detected from space as shockwaves
encircled the earth. The catastrophe that would bring Japan so very close to
collapse had begun.
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