“That was the first time I’d ever seen such a terrible situation,” said Matsuo, a veteran firefighter with decades of emergency response experience.
But the disaster also held lessons on the importance of community planning and community involvement in responding to a crisis, he said.
The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck March 11, 2011, was the most powerful recorded earthquake ever to hit Japan and the fourth-strongest worldwide since modern record-keeping began in 1900.
The earthquake set off tsunami waves that reached as high as 133 feet and wiped out entire towns.
Matsuo, a deputy fire chief for the Sanda City Fire Department in south-central Japan, was dispatched nearly 600 miles to the northeast to help with the aftermath and reconstruction.
Despite their best efforts, the sheer magnitude of the disaster was too much for emergency responders alone, but luckily they had some extra help, Matsuo told a gathering of the Yakima County fire chiefs and members of the Yakima Fire Department.
That’s because after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which left around 5,000 people dead and devastated the city, many places across Japan began enacting community-based disaster response training, he said.
In his experience, Matsuo said that the vast majority of survivors after a catastrophe like the 2011 tsunami are rescued by their neighbors and other civilians from the community.
“Before the disaster, people should prepare their mind and during the earthquake people should be calm, not panic,” he said.
It was critical for the community to have leaders already established who could direct response efforts, said Matsuo.
Matsuo said he saw many different shelters in Minamisanriku, a costal resort town of about 14,000 and which some have called ground zero for the earthquake. An estimated 95 percent of buildings in the town were destroyed.
The smaller the shelters, the more efficiently and orderly the community was able to keep them, he said.
One of these was a shelter in a converted middle school gym housing around 500 people. Matsuo said it was largely calm and orderly, had water and the toilets were clean.
In contrast, a larger shelter he saw downtown housed some 3,000 people. It was overcrowded, the bathrooms were overflowing with feces and the government officials always seemed too busy to render much assistance, he said.
Matsuo touched on the potential earthquakes which have been generating much attention in national news the past few days. The current The New Yorker magazine details how the Pacific Northwest may be due for a large earthquake in the relatively near future.
“If the next rupture of the Cascadia Subduction zone were of the magnitude of nine, we might be in for a magnitude of six or seven here in Yakima,” said Matsuo.
Matsuo said it is critical for volunteer firefighters to be alert and constantly drilling. Just as important, he believes, is for neighborhoods and communities to have strong relationships with their neighbors in the face of disaster.
Ted Vander Houwen, Yakima fire department deputy chief, said Yakima is expanding its disaster emergency preparedness. One of those preparations may be starting similar community-based training programs here in Yakima like in Japan.
“I think it’s definitely a goal that we have,” Vander Houwen said.
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