Traveling through the mountains and up the coast allowed us to take in the scale of what happened. Every village we passed was damaged and appeared eerily empty of people. The tsunami warning forced extensive evacuations, and few people had yet to return. Officials have urged people to stay away from their homes for now because of the high risk of another strong earthquake.
In Kuroshima, a protected historic site on the outskirts of Wajima, the temples and traditional wood buildings had been through many earthquakes before. But the force of this one was different, leaving several of the old structures in ruins. Like many communities across the Noto peninsula, most of the residents are elderly.
“They may not have the energy, resources, or time to rebuild,” one man told us. “The sense of loss is quite profound.”
Looking out toward the sea offered signs of how Japan’s landscape had been altered there, too. Experts say the tectonic shifts from the quake pushed the ground up 13 feet in some areas and moved it sideways by more than 3 feet. The ocean floor is now higher.
From Kuroshima, you can see a breakwall but there is water on only one side of it. The local port appears to have shifted up and over, we were told, making it too shallow for local fishermen. There is also now a wide expanse of beach that did not exist before.
Wajima straddles a cove on the peninsula, just 20 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, the strongest to rock the country in nearly 12 years. There have been more than 600 aftershocks, according to Japan’s Meteorological Agency, that have knocked out water infrastructure and electricity. Outside a recreation hall now being used as an evacuation center, the clock is stuck at 4:10pm — when the biggest of the earthquakes hit.
The death toll has reached 126, according to officials, and more than 200 people remain unaccounted for or trapped in the rubble. Experts talk about a 72-hour window to reach survivors, and…
Read the full article here