Toll Up to 99 in Japan Quake and Tsunamis

Tsunamis that surged up to 16 feet high within 15 minutes of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the bed of the Sea of Japan off Hokkaido island were blamed Tuesday for most of the 99 deaths and 160 missing in Japan’s latest seismic disaster.

Even though Japan is known to have the best warning system for the seismic sea waves that are most common in the Pacific Ocean basin and have occasionally struck both Hawaii and California, scientists said there was not enough time after the quake at 10:17 local time Monday night to adequately warn the populace.

“It was dark,” said Dennis Sigrist of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu. “The Japanese Meteorological Agency broadcast their tsunami warning within five minutes of the earthquake. Sirens sounded in many places.

“But their report is that the initial waves hit Hokkaido at 10:30 p.m. If you’re in bed, that doesn’t give you much time to get out of your house and to higher ground.”

The waves, traveling at speeds of more than 500 m.p.h. on the open sea but slowing down and piling high in coastal areas, also caused damage and a few casualties hundreds of miles away on the Russian coast at Nakhodka near Vladivostok, where a 10-foot wave hit, and on the east coast of South Korea, where 60 boats were wrecked at Sokch’o and other ports.

But most of the damage, deaths and missing were on the small island of Okushiri, 30 miles south of the quake’s epicenter, where shaking, followed by huge waves, landslides and fires, destroyed 540 houses and killed about 60 people among the population of 4,600.

The Associated Press reported that an entire hillside collapsed on the island’s two-story wooden Yoyoso Hotel in the village of Inaho, killing at least 16 people. About 10 others were missing.

Gas stoves apparently started a firestorm, which leveled an area the size of six football fields in Aonae at the southern end of the island.

“After the tsunami, the whole area here just caught on fire in about 20 minutes,” said squid fisherman Fujihari Hatsuzuka, 63, walking around a pile of smoking ashes that used to be his wooden house. “People just got out. When you know there’s a tsunami coming, you don’t worry about whether your gas stove is on or not.”

Fires destroyed about half the 680 homes in Aonae.

“I never had much, but what I had, I lost it all,” said Hatsuzuka, whose life savings of about $2,700 went up in flames.

About 20 dead were reported on the west coast of Hokkaido, where such towns as Suttsu, Kamoenal and Esashi were hard hit. In Esashi, witnesses said the wave smashed cars against nearby rocks and sucked about 30 vehicles into the harbor. Some cars had their lights on and may have been occupied when washed away.

Japanese reports Tuesday told of villagers searching the shoreline for bodies, wandering through a wreckage-strewn landscape of metal roofs, twisted buses, overturned cars, bedding, rice bowls and family photographs.

In all, 200 cars were reported to have been washed away by waves that came as far as 600 feet inland before falling back. The National Maritime Agency, Japan’s coast guard, said more than 200 vessels were lost. Television pictures showed large fishing boats beached by the huge waves.

But, scientists said Tuesday, the damage could have been even worse had the earthquake been centered east of Hokkaido in the North Pacific, rather than west of it in the Sea of Japan.

“If it had been centered in the Pacific, it could have caused a transoceanic tsunami,” said Edward N. Bernard, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine environmental laboratory in Seattle.

“California might have gotten a two-meter (6 1/2-foot) wave, and that would have been messy. It was just a one-meter wave that killed 10 at Crescent City, Calif., in 1964 after the Alaskan earthquake.”

The National Weather Service, in a statement issued Tuesday, noted, “Contrary to what some might think, tsunamis do threaten coastal residents of Southern California.”

Tsunamis are usually caused by earthquakes at sea, although occasionally the cause can be land-based earthquakes, landslides or volcanic eruptions. They have crested as high as 210 feet and have crossed the Pacific, from Chile to Japan, in just 24 hours.

In the huge Krakatoa eruption near the Indonesian island of Java in 1883, waves swept across the Indian Ocean and into the Atlantic. Even the English Channel recorded a minor rise in the water level.

Waves of Destruction

The fiercest earthquake to hit Japan in 15 years unleashed a catastrophic round of waves that reached South Korea and Russia.

1) Many deaths reported on Okushiri Island

2) Hundreds of homes wiped out on Hokkaido coast

3) Waves reach Russian shore

4) Fishing boats destroyed on coast of South Korea

5) Waves also take toll on Honshu