Children of the Tsunami
This is an account of the Japanese tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster seen through the eyes of Japanese children. The tsunami occurred just before school closed on Friday afternoon. It destroyed many schools along 200 miles of Japan’s northeast coast. Except for Okawa Primary School, all schools were abandoned on the high ground.
The earthquake that triggered the tsunami occurred at 2:46 pm on March 11. The magnitude of the earthquake was 9 degrees on the Richter scale and it lasted for more than two minutes. Before the tsunami reached Okawa Primary School, it destroyed two other schools near the sea. The teachers of the first school managed to raise the children to a higher level. Then the tsunami hit No. 2 Elementary School, and the teachers and children managed to escape to the roof.
Now the tsunami hit the school in Okawa, two miles inland. It has been over 1/2 hour since the disaster started and approximately 100 children are still in the school recess. The teachers were debating whether to take the high ground behind the school or the bridge next to it. During that half-hour, the tsunami left a mass of debris along Japan’s 200-mile Pacific coast, killing 19,000 people. As the tsunami subsided, another tragedy struck 100 miles south of Okawa Elementary School in Fukushima.
The tsunami knocked out the cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and nuclear fuel in three reactors began to melt down. As authorities tried to regain control of the plant, one of the reactors exploded. Two days after the explosion, a second blast sent a haze of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. Twenty-six hours after the tsunami, Japan issued an evacuation order for anyone within 12 miles of the facility. Over the next two days, 80,000 people fled their homes.
