TEHRAN, March 10-When a massive earthquake struck in 2011, Japanese oyster fisherman Atsushi Fujita was working as usual by the sea. Soon after, a huge black wave slammed into his city and killed nearly 2,000 people.
TEHRAN,Young Journalists Club (YJC) -When a massive earthquake struck in 2011, Japanese oyster fisherman Atsushi Fujita was working as usual by the sea. Soon after, a huge black wave slammed into his city and killed nearly 2,000 people.
Seven years on, Fujita and thousands like him along Japan’s northeast coast have rebuilt their lives alongside huge sea walls that experts say will protect them if another giant tsunami, which some see as inevitable in a seismically active nation like Japan, was to strike.
The 12.5-meter (41-ft) concrete wall replaced a 4-meter breakwater that was swamped in the March 11, 2011 disaster. The earthquake and tsunami, which reached as high as 30 meters in some areas, killed nearly 18,000 people across Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.
“It feels like we’re in jail, even though we haven’t done anything bad,” the 52-year-old Fujita said.
(Click reut.rs/2oT9XTa to see a picture package of the sea walls built after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.)
Since the disaster, some towns have forbidden construction in flat areas nearest the coast and have relocated residents to higher land. Others, such as Rikuzentakata, have raised the level of their land by several meters before constructing new buildings.
A common thread, though, is the construction of seawalls to replace breakwaters that were overwhelmed by the tsunami. Some 395 km (245 miles) of walls have been built at a cost of 1.35 trillion yen ($12.74 billion).
“The seawalls will halt tsunamis and prevent them from inundating the land,” said Hiroyasu Kawai, researcher at the Port and Airport Research Institute in Yokosuka, near Tokyo.
“Even if the tsunami is bigger than the wall, the wall will delay flooding and guarantee more time for evacuation.”
Source:Reuters
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