To Find Whether My Family is Safe

On 13 and 14 March, 2011 -.

What people want to know best is whether their family are safe when natural disasters occur.  Phone did not work next day neither, so many people were using Twitter, social networking services, google person finders to get information of their family.  Most of the time, I was checking information on Twitter and share them with my friends and people from my hometown.  I thought information is the most vital.  Even if they are small pieces of information, when many of them are accumulated, they will be useful to capture what happened in my hometown as a whole.

I registered my parents name on Google Person Finder, and sent an email to a local radio station so that they would read aloud the name of my parents.  They were reading aloud all messages from listeners for 24 hours.  I understood how a local radio was important because listeners may have a portable radio though they cannot watch tv, and they tell us very detailed information such as who are looking for whom, which roads are available, and which shelter does not have enough foods, etc...  Besides, the national broadcasting and large private tv stations could not work on these and were not very helpful to grasp the local condition.  I also wrote how my classmates in Lund were worrying about them.  I knew there was no electricity and my parents might not be listening to the radio, but I wanted to do try everything I could do.  So did many people, I guess.

One of the most important information were satellite and aerial photos of my hometown.  You can see which areas were devastated by the tsunami from the photos.  The coastal areas were mostly destroyed as you can see in the aerial photos.

Centre of Kamaishi

North of Kamaishi

Rikuzen Takata

I got to know the houses near by the coast in my home area were washed out.  The tsunami came to the train station, but it seemed it did not go further.  The tsunami did not reach my home because its altitude is a little high though it is just about 1.2 km away from the coast.  I got to know my home seemed safe.  But I could not know where were my parents when the earthquake occurred.  If they were in the downtown...such a negative imagination comes out many times.

According to the news and information on Twitter, there were many people evacuated from the tsunami and they were in a public shelter, but they really lacked of foods and water.  It was very cold for them because the temperature was below 0 and it was snowing.  What made it worse was there was no electricity and oil, so the condition in the shelters.  Each public shelter made lists of evacuees, and the prefecture police office collects them and showed them online.  These are quite important information source for us.

Later, I found there was my mother's name on the list.  She seemed to be in the city court in the downtown of Kamaishi.  But I was wondering where my father was.  Why they are not together...?

(Written by Take, Lund University)