August 13, 2013
Another heart-stopping tsunami video from Japan
Posted by Austin Elliott
A “new” video has emerged of the Tohoku tsunami racing inland in a Japanese port town. I don’t know that it’s never been released before, but I sure haven’t seen it, and I’ve seen basically all of them.
The video is embedded at the end of this post.
Update 8/19/13: I have changed the video link to a more original YouTube video. It appears that the videographer is a Mr. Kenichi Kurakami, a brave soul indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8qFi74k2UE
As in the multitude of tsunami videos before it, the footage here is jaw-dropping. The Tohoku tsunami was so horrifyingly huge that no matter how much you expect it, it’s always shocking to watch just how relentlessly it surges inland.
In this video, filmed in Kesennuma Port (as an aside, with no knowledge but the background of the video and a keen eye for satellite imagery, it took me about 5 minutes to find the exact spot this is filmed from in Google Maps–I surprise myself sometimes) it’s at once easy to understand the witnesses’ initial disbelief, and impossible to comprehend their horror and dismay as they get chased to the upper stories of an apartment building, only to be trapped there watching their town ravaged by water, earth, and fire. Kesennuma Port is also the site of at least two of the other particularly dramatic videos of this tsunami.
There are a ton of things to note and learn from in this video. The power behind the wave is immediately clear, even in the small initial surge. Then the ocean rushes inland with incredible speed and volume. The Tohoku tsunami is incredibly scary because of the way it gets worse and worse faster and faster. This shocking intensification can be traced back to the original rupture of the seafloor, which lurched outward and upward most violently at the patch farthest from the coast. With hindsight, we watch in horror as the townspeople look on without fleeing. But consider: before having seen all these videos, would you have ever suspected what was about to come? Footage like this helps us appreciate the deceptive danger of these incredible disasters so that we may heed what warning we have in the future with true humility.
The notable element of this video that separates it from the others is the way it lingers in the aftermath, giving a glimpse into the dire and excruciating dusk as a monstrous fire breaks out in town, and the ocean continues to surge in and out in gargantuan waves. The fleeing strangers are now trapped together in a dark apartment surrounded by the wreckage of their town, with ongoing threats assailing them from outside. At this point, you would suspect anything could happen next.
The video is long, but the drama of the event is so captivating I can’t imagine you’d want to skip around. It’s a fine replacement for a contrived 23-minute episode of TV drama. In any case, if you do want to “fast forward”, and since I did watch the whole thing, I’ll finish off with a timeline of the key elements (don’t get tempted to read these spoilers if you’re going for the full dramatic effect).
0:00 – 1:45 – drawdown of river water
1:00 – civil warning announcements
1:45 – inbound tsunami first appears
3:25 – boats get ripped from moorings, water velocity quickly becomes apparent
5:26 – sirens sound and people *finally* decide to flee. Eeek.
6:13 – Not sure that’s “high ground”
6:24 – pedestrian bridge takes hard buffeting
6:51 – retreat up the stairs
7:12 – water overtops wall
8:13 – pedestrial bridge taken out
9:30 – huge slug of debris shows up
10:46 – first of many ruptured fuel tanks spews pressurized vapor. (YouTube conspiracy theorists, delight!)
11:10 – water high enough to start taking out local cars/trees/structures/power lines
19:53 – scene change, water finally receding, fire started
20:00 – patronizingly indifferent snow begins falling
22:40 – sunset, still stuck, fire hugely expanded, new surges of tsunami
Sad and horrifying. Unbelievable force of the water, and unbelievable strength of the people experiencing. I went to Google maps to see how the town is faring now. Arrested by neatly stacked rows of wrecked vehicles, lined up, sun gleaming, calm inlet. I wonder how it looks on Timeline?
I can’t see the video at all. Can you post the link, please? Thanks.
Oops. I guess embedded videos can be tricky. Here’s a link to it on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/0gh3JrdL-Zg
Also, for some reason all my links above start at 22 minutes into the video, despite the links not explicitly directing to that. That’s odd…
Thank you. It’s an amazing video.
Austin, there is a box to the right of the video screen saying “Start at”. if it is checked, the video will start at that point.
Yeah, I know… But only my screen grab of the fire links explicitly to the 22:45 mark. The other two links do not include explicit timestamps, but still start up on YouTube at that mark. Must be something about the way WordPress processes links to the same site. I have no idea. Oh well. We can all at least figure out the scrubbing bar and send ’em back to 0:00.
I so very much wish we could force every person here in the Puget Sound basin to sit down and watch the entire video. We are so unprepared for this series of events that we now know will indeed happen sometime in our future.
Absolutely. Though this tsunami was an anomalously large and extreme one, even at its more modest, early stages the imagery is fearsome and the effects devastating. These videos are a powerful medium for people on other subduction zones (ahem, NorCal, Oregon, Washington). This is what coastal PacNW towns will in fact look like at some point, probably within this century.
I thought the person in the water at 19:34 deserved to be on your timeline.
Oh my, I hadn’t even realized that was a person; it’s such a fleeting shot. Incredible to survive being swept up in that debris-laden torrent.
And again at 20:15, that human is alive and climbing.
I saw this video a few months ago on YouTube.. but yes. Just awful.
“With hindsight, we watch in horror as the townspeople look on without fleeing. But consider: before having seen all these videos, would you have ever suspected what was about to come?”
Not to be that guy, but I’d have to say yes. I knew that a sign of a tsunami is the receding of water well below low-tide levels. I’d think that living in Japan they would hopefully know that, but apparently it’s not common knowledge. I see the river draining out to the ocean and think “Get out of there, don’t you know what’s coming?!”. How far inland up uphill can you get in 8 minutes?
That’s fair, and I think most people do know that–the video is being filmed because the receding water is a signature of what’s about to come. But I doubt you were unsurprised by the ultimate height of that water. I think we develop profound levels of trust and security–backed up by that modest seawall, for instance, and the fact that when the water surges in initially it remains below that elevation for a long time–that make it difficult to conceive of what exactly will happen in these extremely rare events.
I knew what was coming and still kept telling myself, ‘there’s no way it can get over that wall.’ Boy was I wrong.
I teach marine science and during our study of waves we cover tsunami. I live in Hawaii. Your site was very helpful in not only showing students the effects but educating them on the cause. Thanks for your hard work!
[…] tradotto da blogs.agu.org […]
[…] a new video of the tsunami went live, and it is a remarkable, 25-minute account from Kesennuma Port, starting from the moments […]