Yu Muroga was doing his job making deliveries when the 11 March 2011 earthquake hit in Japan. Unaware, like many people in the area, of how far inland the tsunami would travel, he continued to drive and do his job. The HD camera mounted on his dashboard captured not only the earthquake, but also the moment he and several other drivers were suddenly engulfed in the tsunami. He escaped from the vehicle seconds before it was crushed by other debris and sunk underwater. His car and the camera have only recently been recovered by the police. The camera was heavily damaged but a video expert was able to retrieve this footage.
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Labyrinths
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.
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Amazing.
Did you notice the guy who bolted from the car when the water came up and ran off to the right? I think he should have climbed up the ladder of that big heavy tanker truck right next to him…
You mean the guy who went back to make sure the door was shut? lol
I’d probably do the wrong thing and run to the tallest building nearby and climb to the highest floor I could.
His wife, or whoever he was abandoning, probably was screaming at him to shut the damn door, he left her car to sink like a rock, and what was he born in a BARN?!?
There are photos of a five-story building with big radio antennae on top. A few people, including the mayor, made it up there and clung for their lives, in the freezing water, all night long. The mayor has scars on his hands from hanging on:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_kIWY2DV0KnE/TZvoEITpljI/AAAAAAAAJDQ/FdNqblzEqVQ/Tsunami%201.jpg
The power of that water is beyond comprehension. I can’t even imagine being caught in it!
Just horrifying, especially up close like that.
I keep thinking, what would I have done?
Except for that one guy who bolted from the car, people seemed to be very collected about it all. Or in shock.
In this documentary that was shown on the anniversary of the Fukushima tsunami, they showed a pair of government workers driving through a town, frantically urging people to get out because a tsunami was coming. Some people ran, but most of them just stared blankly like they had no ideal what the men were shouting about. Seconds later, their car was engulfed in water, and they just managed to get out and climb into what used to be a second story window. I wondered what happened to all those people who didn’t try to get away. I also thought about the number of times I saw or heard a tornado warning in Minnesota and didn’t bother to grab the kids and run to the basement. Part of it may have been we’d gotten too many false alarms: but I think we were just tremendously lucky. The worst we ever experienced was having a tree fall on the house and damage the roof. But what if? Suppose we got a warning about a massive tsunami in California? Would we run? Or stare blankly?
Crescent City, CA, is not a place I would want to live, that’s for sure.
I live in earthquake country, have all my life. It’s got to be a pretty big rattler for me to even stand up. We get so used to them. Tsunamis are so rare. Hasn’t there not been any big ones within the memories of anyone living other than octogenarians? (Wow that’s a crappy sentence, but oh well.)
I can remember the tsunami that followed the huge Anchorage earthquake in 1964. I was too little to understand the magnitude of it, though I can recall being scared after reading the National Geographic article about it. There are tsunami warning signs all along the Northwest coast and Highway 1, but judging from the number of beachfront homes out there, I guess people still don’t take it seriously. People in Crescent City complain they get too many false tsunami alerts every time an earthquake occurs on the Pacific Rim, so it makes them a little too blase.
Do you remember this novel, The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, which started the idea that the entire state would someday fall into the Pacific due to a massive earthquake? State geologists have repeatedly said it’ll never happen, at least in the manner the book describes, but it did make me a little jumpy whenever we get a quake strong enough to shake stuff off of the table. My younger daughter, raised in Minnesota, says she runs to a doorway and braces herself when San Francisco gets a “swayer.” I can’t think of anything that makes you feel more tiny and helpless than an earthquake.
True that. And those geologists are right; that will never happen. But it doesn’t stop all the conservative types who hate la-la-land enough to dream of it happening someday!
Wow, that was pretty intense. The water came in so damn fast.
I guess they just barely got out of the truck before it sank.
Amazing video. Thanks for sharing.
It was only just recently unearthed and recovered.