ISHINOMAKI MISSING PEOPEL JAPAN EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI

 Thousands of families are missing loved ones almost three weeks after a powerful earthquake and tsunami devastated towns and lives along Japan’s northeast coast.
Every evening Suzuki slips under the quilt of her futon shortly after sunset around 7:00 pm because there is nothing to do in the pitch darkness.
This district of Ishinomaki still has no electricity, tap water or gas.“I don’t read newspapers, I don’t listen to the radio. They are talking about horrible things,” Suzuki, who has been a widow for years, says as she prepares to sleep on the second floor of her house.“Why do I have to know more when I’ve seen enough myself?” She wakes up as the sun rises. She goes downstairs to clear rubble left by the tsunami that smashed into the ground floor on March 11 and heaped tragedy on this quiet town in Miyagi prefecture.
It was a day when in Miyagi a man felt his mother’s hand slip out of his tight grasp, three children watched their mother being washed away, and an elderly couple vanished with their grandchild, their three bodies later found.Suzuki clears the debris inside her house, which was hit by a wave that at this point was two metres (six feet) high, against the sound of a helicopter overhead that is carrying away newly retrieved bodies.Mud covers family photos and other keepsakes, and the smell of rotten seawater with fish and kelp fills the air.
In the neighbourhood, overturned cars and ships lie scattered on the roads and in other people’s gardens. People walk under a car that is stuck between two buildings like a bridge.
Suzuki’s most important mission is not to clear up rubble but to find her 41-year-old daughter, who has been missing since the day of the disaster.
Suzuki was in the city of Sendai, some 60 kilometres (37 miles) away from her home town, when the 9.0-magnitude quake struck beneath the sea floor.
She managed to return home on the afternoon of the following day, having shared a taxi from Sendai to a place near Ishinomaki and then walked through knee-deep water amid floating bodies for seven hours.When she got home, her daughter was not in the house they have shared.“I failed to die,” Suzuki says as she ponders her pain.Throwing away her tatami mats, fridge, TV sets and furniture means nothing compared with the agony of searching for her daughter, she says.Whenever she spots earth-moving machinery clearing a mountain of rubble to the side of a road, she trails it. “Please, please do it gently. My daughter may be in there,” she asks the driver.The body of another, elderly woman was indeed found in the debris of a nearby supermarket.Many who are searching for their loved ones have experienced the painful process of feeling their hopes whittled down slowly, day by day.
They initially hope that the person is unhurt, then they think he or she isn’t home or is at a shelter, or has been injured and hospitalised.After they learn that the person’s name is not on the lists of inpatients at hospitals, they are left with the hope the person is in a coma and therefore cannot be contacted. Finally, their wish becomes only to find the person’s body.
Families visit makeshift morgues to find the last thing they want to see.There are lists of bodies, all numbered.Some are identified by the name on the papers they carried, others are anonymous and described only in sparse phrases such as “a female in her 30s. Height about 160cm” or “about three years old”.When you give the police the number of the body you want to see, you are shown its pictures.If you think it is the person you are looking for, you are led into a hall where rows of bodies are laid out in plain-wood coffins or plastic bags, with the smell of burning incense sticks in the air.People weep as they find a person they have cared for dearly or shared their lives with, now a stiff body with drenched hair, naked and in a blanket following their autopsy.In the nearby town of Higashimatsushima, a young couple sits by a coffin, which seems too big for their dead baby inside. They are in utter silence, staring vacantly into space.A line of relatives passes another coffin, and one says to the lifeless body inside: “The way you held out is great!” Identical memos, handwritten in large red letters, are left on two coffins lying side by side.

Japan's nuclear crisis

 SENDAI: Japan's nuclear crisis escalated Tuesday as two more blasts and a fire rocked a quake-stricken atomic power plant, sending radiation up to dangerous levels.
Radiation around the Fukushima No.1 plant on the eastern coast had "risen considerably", Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, and his chief spokesman announced the level was now high enough to endanger human health.
In Tokyo, some 250 kilometres (155 miles) to the southwest, authorities also said that higher than normal radiation levels had been detected in the capital, the world's biggest urban area, but not at harmful levels.
Kan warned people living up to 10 kilometres (six miles) beyond a 20 km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the nuclear plant to stay indoors.
The fire, which was later reportedly extinguished, was burning in the plant's number-four reactor, he said, meaning that four out of six reactors at the facility are now in trouble.
The official death toll has risen to 2,414, police said Tuesday, but officials say at least 10,000 are likely to have perished.
The crisis at the ageing Fukushima plant has escalated daily after Friday's quake and tsunami which knocked out cooling systems.
On Saturday an explosion blew apart the building surrounding the plant's number-one reactor. On Monday, a blast hit the number-three reactor, injuring 11 people and sending plumes of smoke billowing into the sky.
Early on Tuesday a blast hit the number-two reactor. That was followed shortly after by a hydrogen explosion which started a fire at the number-four reactor.
Hashimoto said supermarkets are open but shelves are completely empty. "Many children are sick in this cold weather but pharmacies are closed. Emergency relief goods have not reached evacuation centres in the city.
Everyone is anxious and wants to get out of town. But there is no more petrol. We are afraid of using a car as we may run out of petrol."
The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Tokyo had asked for expert assistance in the aftermath of the quake which US seismologists are now measuring at 9.0-magnitude, revised up from 8.9.

But the IAEA's Japanese chief Yukiya Amano moved to calm global fears that the situation could escalate to rival the world's worst nuclear crisis at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986.
Officials have already evacuated 210,000 people in the exclusion zone around the crippled plant.
At one shelter, a young woman holding her baby told public broadcaster NHK: "I didn't want this baby to be exposed to radiation. I wanted to avoid that, no matter what."
Further north in the region of Miyagi, which took the full brunt of Friday's terrifying wall of water, rescue teams searching through the shattered debris of towns and villages have found 2,000 bodies.
And the Miyagi police chief has said he is certain more than 10,000 people perished in his prefecture.
Millions have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and facing harsh conditions with sub-zero temperatures overnight, and snow and rain forecast.
Tokyo stocks, which were punished Monday when the markets reopened, sending indexes around the world sliding, plummeted another 12 percent by early afternoon on Tuesday.
Leading risk analysis firm AIR Worldwide said the quake alone would exact an economic toll estimated at between $14.5 billion and $34.6 billion (10 billion to 25 billion euros) -- even leaving aside the effects of the tsunami.

Worlds flooding tsunami history

Netherlands, 1287
The Zuider Zee flooded after a seawall callapsed. At least 50,000 people were killed in Holland and more than 500 in England as a result.

China, 1642
Flooding takes about 300,000 lives.

Indonesia, 1815
Mount Tambora (volcano) on Sumbawa Island released about 50 cubic kilometers of magma over at least 500,000 square kilometers of Indonesia and the Java Sea. That eruption and the resulting tsunami took at least 10,000 lives. But the famine and disease that followed took another 82,000 lives - total: over 90,000.

Japan, 1826
Tsunami kills about 27,000.

China, 1887
The worst flood in "modern history" happened in China in 1887. The Yellow River overflowed, causing the death of about 900,000 people. (Some reports say it was a million that parished.)
Japan, 1896
About 28,000 people lost their lives from a Tsunami
China, 1911
Yangtze River flood - approx: 100,000 deaths.

World-wide, 1918 - 19
Influenza pandemic takes somewhere between 35 million and 75 million lives (some reports estimate around a hundred million, but those can't be confirmed) - at least 16 million people died in India alone. This is clearly the worst disaster - at least in the last thousand years.
China, 1931
A flood on the Changjiang River took at least 145,000 people (other estimates go over a million, but we have not confirmed that).

China, 1935
Another Yellow River flood "caused 27 counties inundated and 3.4 million victims".  How many actual lives were killed we don't know. If you have facts, let us hear from you

China, 1933
Another Changjiang River flood takes the lives of at least 140,000 people.

China, 1939
A flood takes about 200,000 lives.

Bangladesh, 1970
In 1970, a cyclone and related floods killed about 500,000 people. With winds of up to 230 km/h, the cyclone crashed into the heavily populated coastal area of the Bay of Bengal, where several river deltas normally provide fertile land. The terrible winds produced massive waves, which wiped out many entire villages. Millions of people were left homeless in this country that is one of the most densely populated and one of the poorest in the world.

Africa, 1981 - 1984
Rivers and lakes dried up from the drought that had incredible impact on twenty African nations. During one season about 20,000 were starving to death EACH MONTH.  150 million were facing starvation if help didn't come right away. People from around the world began to respond to this crisis - but for hundreds of thousands of people, it was too late. (If you have figures for this, please let us know. When combined with other relatively recent African famines, the fugure is well over 1,000,000)

Bangladesh, 1991
Flooding again took its toll on this nation. About  139,000 lost their lives.

North Korea, 1995-98
Over 3 million are said to have died from famine and floods in North Korea.

South Asian Nations, 2004 - 2005

Earthquake of 9.0 and the resulting tsunami creates one of the world's worst disasters.  It does major damage to: Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Somalia, Tanzania, Seychelles, Bangladesh, and Andaman.  Deaths: Between 235,000 and 285,000.