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slickmitch t1_j71ukqo wrote

As a kid growing up I would always see Tsunami depicted as a giant wave like a surfer would ride. After this happened I realized why we called them Tidal Waves in the states and that they are way way WAY more terrifying than any giant wave could be. Might as well be a giant blender chewing up towns. Unreal amounts of destruction.

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saluksic t1_j73jgtd wrote

18:30 ish for completely unreal images of a city being carried over fields by a black wave. This is something else, I've never see anything like this.

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dugongfanatic t1_j74v3ph wrote

If you want to see an absolute HORROR of tsunami footage, I recommend watching Boxing Day tsunami footage. The Bandeh Aceh footage is some of the most terrifying film in history in my opinion and I was raised in the rotten dot com age. There is nothing on this planet that could’ve prepared me for that, it’s unreal. I believe there’s only one known existing video of the tsunami actually hitting.

In some ways I think it’s worse because of the lack of preparation. I went through a tsunami deep dive/research phase a few years ago - had a design project regarding disaster prep materials and the content really grabbed me. Historical research and first person accounts of natural disasters became a bit of a passion project after that assignment.

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ermahglerb t1_j779jb1 wrote

Yeah that tsunami was many many times worse than Japan's, mainly because there was no real warning system in the less developed countries that were hit. I think over 200,000 people were estimated to have been killed.

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dugongfanatic t1_j78lr5c wrote

Upwards of 230k, an absolutely incredible loss of life across the globe

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JamesDean26 t1_j73wjrj wrote

They are horrible and I know what you mean. But I’m sorry, a giant wave roaring higher than city skylines coming at you is objectively worse 😂

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ThenIstartedBlasting t1_j70y0p3 wrote

Was about to post this too. Crazy moments captured and put together in a timeline.

Must have been pure Horror.

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jpba1352 t1_j71v0ej wrote

I was in western Tokyo. Incredibly strong shaking. It was hard to watch the news as it happened.

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condaleza_rice t1_j72vxip wrote

I have a friend who lost his sister in this. It was really awful.

He was in the U.S., and initially she was just reported as missing. During that time he was holding out hope, but so so frustrated at not being able to do anything about it. To cling to hope, knowing that each passing day makes a good outcome less likely...awful.

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maidenfern t1_j74t5pk wrote

Has he heard the story of the wind telephone someone set up in his garden? It’s just a pay phone booth that isn’t connected to anything where people come to talk to people who went missing in the tsunami. This American Life featured it in a really good episode.

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condaleza_rice t1_j76gxqg wrote

I'll check out the episode, thanks for sharing it. He's been back to that area a few times since, so he might be familiar with it. Unfortunately it's been a few years since we last saw each other.

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maidenfern t1_j76meiu wrote

I hope you like it, I listened to it again today and it still brings me to tears. I can’t imagine what he and everyone else went through. It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest.

The story was originally covered by NHK so he may have. Hopefully your friend is ok and you can see each other sometime soon.

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BlueHarvestJ t1_j71acja wrote

I had some serious stress reliving this. Even though I live in Tokyo which was unaffected by the Tsunami, I felt like it was happening all over again.

It’s a great doc. Watch with something to clutch or hug. It isn’t easy.

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master_overthinker t1_j71rxg5 wrote

Same. I was living in Tokyo. The big earthquake and all that daily afterquake after that gave me PTSD for a long time. One time I was staying at a tiny resort on a small island in Cambodia, the strong wind blowing underneath my hut kept me awake all night coz I kept thinking it's the tsunami.

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tenclubber t1_j72jtrd wrote

It was crazy to see all the people just stuck when the trains stopped running. Gobs of people just walking down the middle of streets trying to get home at night with no other way.

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dizzysn t1_j72y8w7 wrote

Very eerie to know that watching some of the videos of the morning of, there's a high chance a large number of the people you see in the videos are now dead.

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ThePopeofHell t1_j74jvnj wrote

Same. I was staying in a hotel for work and hear commotion coming from the tv I left on while I was in the shower. Couldn’t believe it.

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Mackheath1 t1_j740usk wrote

We also forget, too, that during the 2004 tsunami, way less would be carrying around personal recording devices in Thailand, so we can only imagine with this how bad it was there.

(My cadaver dog and I helped with cleanup work in Phuket and the aftermath was reminiscent of this)

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Born2fayl t1_j72uxfd wrote

Horrifying. FIFTEEN meter tsunami hit Fukushima. All the scared people and yelling and confusion. Just terrible. This is so much more intense and so much larger in scale than I imagined it when reading about it at the time.

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kathatter75 t1_j736fzd wrote

I flew into San Francisco the morning after it hit in Japan. There was a man on my hotel shuttle who was getting in from Japan. He was working at the Fukushima plant when it happened. He offered to stay and help, but they were quickly gathering up foreign workers and shuttling them to Tokyo to send them home.

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merrimoocow t1_j75cvvw wrote

Why did they want the foreigners going back home?

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kathatter75 t1_j75dll0 wrote

When there’s a big disaster, it’s hard enough to keep track of the people you know live there without adding to it the people who are visiting. And it was probably a safety precaution for the foreign workers at the nuclear plant, in case it went bad (which it did).

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pastaMac t1_j72yo42 wrote

Difficult to watch. The scale this happened on... viewed from the helicopter. There's a scene where people are looking down a narrow street as they begin to see this slurry of cars and water spinning around like a washing machine grinding all kinds of debris* Doom just meters away. In addition to cars, mud and rock and salt water, it must have been chuck full of fuels and oil... a cocktail of nasty shit.

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Lincolnonion t1_j739psi wrote

15:57 - 俺の車は終わった　－ My car is finished

and then "I will never forget it, never"

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RealSkyDiver t1_j7309sh wrote

Watching this live felt a lot more disturbing to me than 9/11. I still can’t watch the footage because I keep getting flashbacks to how I felt.

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commentman10 t1_j73eb0d wrote

whats amazing, i went to japan two months after. and everything was mostly cleared

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Tacolicious78 t1_j73p31g wrote

I was amazed to see the footage of people already trying to clear the street after the earthquake, talking about the incoming tsunami. I hope they made it out.

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Thedutchjelle t1_j73ey96 wrote

This, and the coverage of the great floods in Zeeland about 70 years ago this year.. I don't know if Japan could've prepared for this somehow, I don't know if Dutch dikes would ever have stopped any of that.

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dugongfanatic t1_j74vvxl wrote

Japan is no stranger to tsunamis, historically speaking. Tsunami stones mark the coastline and explicitly states where to build homes to avoid tsunamis, these stones are a century old. Specifically the Aneyoshi stone has a dire warning.

That aside: when it comes to earthquakes, other than building to withstand the force of that shock there’s not a whole lot you can do. I just went through a nearly 6.0 earthquake in late 2022 and it was terrifying.

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Thedutchjelle t1_j75vthz wrote

I was thinking, something like the Maeslantkering in the rivers could perhaps have blocked the surge going so far inland. But then I suppose if that worked that would've already done that.

Thankfully I have no experience with Earthquakes and I hope I never will. The footage in this seems terrifying, I'd fear the building would come down the whole time.

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backtolurk t1_j71fsjf wrote

Already posted but anyway a very important source of footage and great documentary. Scary stuff to say the least.

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LetMeSleep21 OP t1_j72514w wrote

Yup, my reddit-fu was lacking yesterday, thank you!

This documentary really got to me, especially the human perspective of the disaster being showcased.

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flamingoeater t1_j73rprr wrote

There's also one called ' telephone to nowhere' or something. It is powerful.

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AsFarAsItGoes t1_j73zesr wrote

I hope this will stay in our collective memory for a long time, but I have zero confidence that it will last long enough.

Japan has old stone markers telling people to not build below this point, because that’s where the “last big tsunami” hit.

Japan is incredibly save, compared to how many different natural disasters they are prone to. But when nature starts acting up, we are still not much better than a butterfly in a storm.

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quequotion t1_j751g6u wrote

We still do a lot of flood / tsunami drills, but the nuclear distaster has been forgotten.

Japan just recently reauthorized all the old nuclear plants to reopen, extended their licences thirty years beyond their end-of-life, and continues to dump radioactive waste from this disaster into the ocean unabbated.

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timmyrigs t1_j741tws wrote

This might be a dumb question but in a big tsunami like this one do all the sea animals come crashing in as well as all this other debris? I’m watching these giant waves roll in and it’s basically the entire ocean meeting these cities.

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Hellfire242 t1_j72bhss wrote

Someone else posted this yesterday, interesting new footage I’ve not seen before. Crazy earthquakes!

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ermahglerb t1_j7379h9 wrote

I've watched a ton of footage on the Japanese tsunami so I'll give this a watch later. I can still mentally see the absolute destruction of some of those videos and it is unbelievably terrifying. One of them starts out with the camera person on a 30 foot or so high bridge and by the end the bridge is completely submerged. I'll try to post them later if I remember.

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Fordmister t1_j73q2x0 wrote

I remember this being a proper formative memory, I was 15 and NHK's live broadcast was being shown on pretty much every news channel in the world, This was at around 8am UK time I think while I was getting ready for school. I always used to put the BBC news on whilst getting ready in the morning and I just couldn't look away. ended up getting to school around 2 hours late because I just couldn't stop watching.

Like I remembered the boxing day tsunami just but was too young at the time to really understand it, The live feed of a ten meter wall of water just bulldozing everything it its path just made the word Tsunami real in a way noting else can.

Never could bring myself to watch the footage back but just watching the doc has transported me right back to that morning, harrowing stuff.

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SnakePliskin799 t1_j747ka6 wrote

Tsunamis are so interesting and terrifying to me at the same time.

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andromeda-andi t1_j74o2zm wrote

That is absolutely terrifying. Those poor people.

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quequotion t1_j750v6a wrote

There's a lot of footage from that day that will probably never air again.

Even in this, you may notice a scene or two where a camera pans around and you wonder, "Where did everyone go just now?"

Into the water. They're gone.

On the day it was much worse. Many times a helicopter was filming people running, or trying to drive away, only to rotate just enough to show the road they were on wouldn't take them out of the path of the tsunami. Then it would pan all the way around, showing some other part of the destruction, and when it came back the whole road was gone under the water.

I remember one heartbreaking scene where a guy hopped on his scooter and made a bee-line away from the wave, stopping to try to warn people crossing the road he was on that they were doomed. A few seconds later there was nothing but black water and wreckage where all of them had been.

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quequotion t1_j74zg3h wrote

Technically the twelfth year anniversary, but anyway..

Around 12:30 there's a moment that provides a very good reference for how the tsunami came: it wasn't a huge standing wave that crashed over the shoreline; it was a humongous, black amoeba that gradually overwhelmed the coast, the cities, and the people who stayed on the ground wondering what all the fuss was about.

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newbies13 t1_j75tf9t wrote

The people at ground level looking out at the ocean as alarms are going off and people are screaming at them to get to high ground always amazes me.

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brumac44 t1_j76gwuy wrote

What's really scary to me is Japan is probably the most earthquake prepared country in the world, and still there was all this devastation. On the west coast of n america we can have similar intensity tsunamis and are nowhere near as prepared. Its going to be so much worse than this.

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