First came the roar and rumble. Then skyscrapers swayed and highways buckled and walls of water whisked cars, trees, even blazing buildings across the countryside.
“Oh, my God, the building’s going to fall!” Ryan McDonald shouted on a video he sent to CNN as he filmed the scene outside his home in Fukushima. McDonald, an English teacher who has lived in Japan for nine years, is no stranger to earthquakes.
But this one terrified him.
“I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official in Sendai, a city of 1 million about 190 miles north of Tokyo. “I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger.”
Swept away in super-modern Tokyo, miles from the epicenter, were 10 million residents’ daily dependence on all things technological. Nature’s onslaught paralyzed the trains that normally run like clockwork and killed cell phone service, leaving thousands of people in a kind of shock.
Donald Amoroso was conducting research on the top floor of an eight-story building when it started shaking and swaying.
Amoroso, a professor at Kennesaw State University visiting on a technology project, saw books fall from shelves and then entire bookcases topple. Everyone started running down the stairwell, with a few, including Amoroso, stopping at each floor to make sure people got out.
Outside, the street was teeming with people. “It was like everybody in Tokyo was outside their office building,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by phone Friday. Emergency vehicles lurched through the crowds. Aftershocks rocked the city, one about every 10 minutes.
Police and military quickly shut down the freeways. Train service was out, a devastating blow in a city that largely moves by rail.
So Amoroso walked nine miles home. Along the way he saw buildings on fire. In some places, the damage was significant — as was the human toll. People sat on sidewalks waiting for emergency service. Some were bloodied.
When he reached his home in the northern part of the city, the quake made it look ransacked. He had no phone service, but he had power and water. He called his wife through his computer.
Many Tokyo residents roamed the streets or hunkered down at 24-hour cafes, hotels and government offices that were offered as emergency accommodations.
“We are so cold,” said Tomoko Suzuki. “We really don’t know what to do.” Suzuki and her elderly mother stood at a crowded downtown corner, unable to get to their 29th-floor condominium because the elevator wasn’t working. They unsuccessfully tried to hail a taxi to a relative’s house, nor could they find a hotel room.
They found that hotels were not an option as travelers who had been scheduled to leave returned and empty rooms disappeared.
The Tokyo suburb of Yokohama offered blankets for people who wanted to sleep at the community’s main concert hall.
“There has never been a big earthquake like this, when all the railways stopped and so this is a first for us,” Yokohama Arena official Hideharu Terada said. “People are trickling in. They are all calm.”
The most frightening part?
Looking up at the skyscrapers, “They were swaying like trees in the breeze,” said William M. Tsutsui, a professor of Japanese business and economic history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
He was getting off a bus at a hotel in Tokyo, where he was traveling with a business delegation, when the ground began to shake.
“This is the kind of earthquake that hits once every 100 years,” said restaurant worker Akira Tanaka, 54. He gave up waiting for trains to resume and decided — for his first time ever — to set off on foot for his home 12 miles north of the capital. “I’ve been walking an hour and 10 minutes, still have about three hours to go,” he said.
Tokyo prides itself on being an orderly, technologically savvy, even futuristic city. Residents usually can rely on a huge, criss-crossing network of train and subway lines, but authorities were forced to scan the entire web for quake damage and canceled nearly all train service for the day.
Checks of the city’s largest subway system revealed no casualties, Tokyo Metro said. But the company was conducting “walk-through” checks in the system’s tunnels.
AJC staff writer Craig Schneider, The Associated Press, New York Times and Bloomberg News contributed to this article.
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