Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 505 - Drowned by the Horizon: Japan’s 2011 Tsunami Nightmare

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

On March 11th, 2011, the ground beneath Japan didn’t just shake—it unraveled, releasing one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. Minutes later, the ocean rose in response, surging inland with unstoppable force, swallowing towns, families, and entire futures in a matter of moments. What followed was not just a natural disaster, but a cascading nightmare of water, fire, and radiation that left a nation forever changed. This is the story of the day the horizon turned against humanity—and the terrifying cost of underestimating nature. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fukushima is truly a beautiful place. Even when its ridiculous scenic cherry trees aren't blooming, it's a southernmost prefecture, a district similar to a state in the U.S., in the Tohoku region, an area of about 25,000 square miles, famous for its remote beauty. Dense forests and volcanic peaks rise above the fog that often blankets the area's rice patties, apple orchards, and cattle farms. While many of us, especially in the west,

might think of Tokyo's towering cityscape when we think of Japan. its billboards, neon lights, its modern glass and concrete skyscrapers, its bullet trains whizzing people from the city center to the suburbs, life in Fukushima was and is considerably quieter. Indeed, for decades, Fukushima's work was not in the high-tech business-focused realm, but in the practical, the safe, and the steady, supplying produce, dairy products, and seafood to the rest of Japan. But in the space of a few days in 2011, all of that changed. On the afternoon of March 11th, and otherwise unremarkable Friday, the ground beneath Fukushima, indeed the ground beneath much of Han Shu, Japan's biggest island, began to shake.

This on its own, not unusual. Japan experiences thousands of earthquakes each year. Many of them are too small to even feel, or they're over, before residents truly understand what's going on. A few seconds of shaking, maybe some plates rattling in cabinets or pictures against the walls, and then it's all over. But this, this was different. The shaking went on and on and on, not for a minute or two, but for six, six minutes. That's a long time to be stuck taking shelter under a desk or doorway as outside roads crumple and buckle and building sway like palm trees. And it wasn't only homes, offices, and shops that were being shaken by an earthquake.

Roughly midway along the Fukushima coast, six nuclear reactors were lined up in a neat row along the shore. owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tepko, they formed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. At first, the Fukushima Daiichi plant did what it was designed to do. When the earthquake struck, the reactors automatically shut down. Control rods dropped into place, halting nuclear fission. On paper, the system worked. But shutting down a reactor doesn't mean it stops producing heat. And soon, something happened that would alter Fukushima's landscape permanently and make it impossible for operators to shut the plant down as it normally would. And that something was a tsunami.

An inescapably massive, speeding and destructive wall of water, a series of massive, preposterously powerful waves, surged from the earthquake's violent heaving, racing towards Japan's coastline and the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. The tsunami swallowed roads, fields, and towns whole, lifting houses right off their foundations, rapidly carrying them inland as if they weighed nothing. Nothing. Cars spun through streets that became in seconds flat, rushing rivers. Ships were torn from the sea and hurled into buildings some deposited miles inland. So many scared people, fathers, mothers, grandparents, children, ran until they made it to safety or until the water swallowed them up and often pulled their dead bodies back out into the ocean. Truly terrifying stuff. Meanwhile, that same one-two punch battered the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, setting off a chain of events that would threaten the safety of millions.

Nobody had thought such a thing could happen. An earthquake, sure. There were tons of them, even bad ones. And yeah, a tsunami might follow, but much of the coastline was protected by sea walls and barriers built for that very purpose. Billions had been spent on that very infrastructure for that purpose. But no one expected an earthquake and corresponding tsunami

quite this powerful, the most powerful in Japan's history. What happens when a nuclear power plant goes offline before everything can cool down properly. What happens when a controlled shutdown gives way to the possibility and then creeps towards the inevitability of a meltdown? The crazy story of Japan's 2011 deadly trio of disasters today on an earth-shattering ocean-battering nuclear disaster edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck.

You're listening to TimeSuck. Well, happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to The Cult of the Curia. I'm Dan Cummins, a suckmaster, Tanya Harding's karaoke backup dancer. Kent, Massachusetts, Board of Tourism Director, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, praise be to Good Boy, Bojangles, and Glory B to Triple M. If the sound's a little different to you, you're not crazy. Recording remotely in New Orleans today down here for Jazz Fest, and that's why the sound might hit a bit different, but hopefully not too different.

I have faith in Logan Keith polishing this up. I haven't brought it up in a while. Thought I should promote our Bad Magic summer camp again today. A ticket's still on sale for wet hot bad magic summer camp 26. September 10 to the 13th, four days, three nights, so much food, unlimited drinks, a beautiful lake, alive, scared to death. Games, community, amazing people, a stand-up show, local bands, a live astonishing legends podcast, live true crime campfire podcast. You can join hundreds of other campers who have already signed up for some fun outdoors.

go to badmagicproductions.com for more information. And now, well, now time for disaster. Basho, the most famous poet of Edo era Japan, who lived in the second half of the 1600s, one-sided a Chinese poet in describing the far northern reach of Japan. Countries may fall, but the rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again. And for many years, this was true for Japan,

The island nation is no stranger to natural disasters. On average, Japan experiences about 2,000 earthquakes every year. And those are only the ones strong enough to be felt. Most just shake the walls, loosening pictures from their hangings and rattling dishes. Books might tumble off the shelves. Commuters might pause on a suddenly vibrating train, but most continue with their day when the tremors subside as if nothing happened. Sometimes, however, things get worse than that.

A lot worse. The Great Conto earthquake of 1923 leveled, much of Tokyo and Yokohama, killing more than 100,000 people, reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and ash. In 1995, the Han Xin earthquake struck Kobe, collapsing elevated highways, and killing over 6,400 people. Each time, the damage was staggering, unbelievable, mere moments earlier, yet suddenly and irrevocably real. But like Basho said, even Japan's worst natural disasters have been followed by reconstruction. After 1923, Tokyo and Yokohama were rebuilt with new urban plans, wider streets and stricter building standards meant to prevent such devastation from happening again.

Similarly, following the 1995, Han Xin earthquake, Kobe spent years repairing its infrastructure, ultimately re-emerging as a functioning in modern port city with advanced earthquake-enabled architecture. Reconstruction was never easy, but it was expected. Japan had rebuilt before, modernizing both its buildings and its detection system. Anything that happened in the modern era, the era of Tokyo's glittering billboards and towering skyscrapers, the era of cell phones and the dawn of social media, was expected to be far less destructive by comparison. After all, that's how progress works, right?

You get knocked down, you rebuild better. You do everything in your power, not to repeat the same mistakes, the same tragedies. Something bad happens, and you figure out a way to mitigate it going forward. So future generations have less to worry about than past ones did. The 2011 earthquake, and what came after it, would prove that there are disasters of unprecedented power that you just can't realistically prepare for. sometimes Mother Nature will still find a way to destroy you.

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan, the most powerful ever recorded in the nation's history. One of the most powerful in the top four most powerful recorded earthquakes in world history. The most powerful being a 9.5 that struck Chile in 1960, a quake that affected flawless people and ended up being far less lethal. Japan's 2011 earthquake would have been plenty destructive enough on its own had nothing else happened, right? Buildings crumbled. One solid structures like parking lots started to roil like an ocean and a storm, tilting the structures that sat on top of them. In coastal towns across the northern part of Honshu, Japan's main island, electricity grids and water systems were knocked out by the shaking and ruptured gas lines and electrical shorts, sparked fires that emergency responders rushed to put out. And then the water came. Following an earthquake, a massive,

tsunami tore through the Pacific facing coasts of northeastern Japan, swallowing homes, ports, and farmlands. If you've ever seen the video, it is fucking insane. The dark wall of water overwhelmed defenses built for lesser waves, sweeping cars, fishing vessels, entire neighborhoods into a churning deadly mass. And it truly was just a wall of water, a big, fast, powerful one. The tsunami was traveling at up to 500 miles per hour out in the deep open ocean, approximately the speed of a fucking jet airplane, a cruising speed. At Ryoree Bay, Uphanato, the tsunami reached a run-up height, excuse me, of 132 feet, nightmare. And the run-up height, by the way, is not the height of the wave, it's the maximum height above sea level a tsunami reaches on shore.

Fishing equipment ended up being scattered up on the high cliff above the bay. At Tarro, Iwate, the tsunami reached a run-up height of 124 feet up the slope of a mountain that was 660 feet from the coast. Also at the slope of a nearby mountain from 1,300. feet away at Anayoshi Fishery Port of Omae, Peninsula in Miyako, Iwate, Tokyo University of of Marine Science and Technology estimated the tsunami ran up to a height of 128 feet. It was also estimated that the tsunami reached run-up heights of up to 133 feet in Miyako in Tohoku's Iwate Prefecture. Japan, at least in recorded history, but I'd never seen anything remotely like this.

The tsunami was so powerful, so massive, moving so fast, in certain places it pushed up to six miles inland. Imagine living like five miles from the beach, and a big-ass wave still fucking gets you. A bunch of kids from the Okawa Primary School, a school some two-plus miles from the coast, got pulled out to sea and drowned. The school was located on the banks of a river, and the river allowed the tsunami to travel further inland with greater speed than in other places. The school had 108 kids of the 78 who were there at the moment of the tsunami, 74 of them then 10 out of 11 teachers died. I think a tsunami is my ultimate nightmare.

I've only had what I guess was a panic attack. Two times in my life, such a strange feeling. I started hyperventilating. My body started to shake uncontrollably each time. I was embarrassed, also just confused, overwhelmed with the feeling of terror, unlike anything I'd ever felt before or since.

And both times were scuba diving. My body was just like, nope. Even though my mind was like, I can do this. My body's like, no, you can't. One time I saw a shark, some kind they assured me could not bite people like it's literally physically not able to bite people still fucking lost my mind another time i was staring down into the water couldn't see the bottom

it's like in hawaii uh i could see so much darkness out there and i could not stop thinking about what might be in that darkness and what could be coming for me at any second also i have a i had reoccurring vivid dreams when i was a kid where i kept drowning still fucking freak out in the water sometimes today even just like in a lake i'll be feeling fine and then i'll start start thinking about what would happen if I cramped up, how I'm just going to sink into the dark water beneath me, and no one's going to be able to get me, I'm just going to drown there.

And I start to swim as fast as I can to the boat to the shore, which is not fast, because I'm a terrible swimmer. I actually cannot think outside of maybe some sadistic serial killer torturing me over a prolonged period of time of a scarier way to die than being pulled out into the ocean by a tsunami. When the water finally withdrew from around the Okawa Primary School and elsewhere in Japan, and it left behind a landscape of rubble, towns that have been bustling,

just a few minutes before, now reduced to scattered fragments of wood, metal, and concrete. And again, if you ever look online, it is mind-boggling. It's so powerful. A very important structure was not spared from this destruction. As it surged past the shoreline, the tsunami disabled cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiachi nuclear power plant. Cooling systems that were vital to keep nuclear fission in check, circulating water to remove heat even after reactors have been shut down. Without them, a nuclear disaster unprecedented in history was looking more and more possible.

Could the operators working for Tokyo Electric Power Company, aka TEPCO, managed to cool the reactors without power, functioning, gauges, and communication with the outside world? Before we get into today's timeline and look at a lot of this in a lot more detail, let's get scientific, let's look a little overview of why these things happened to begin with. First up, the earthquake. While the earth seems decently stable, from our vantage point, a surface on which us meets acts, you know, have been able to build homes, schools, government buildings, parks, mine shafts,

sex dungeons, loop factories, Renaissance fair, food courts, and more. Miles below the surface, it's a different story. Earth's lithosphere is broken into a clumsy jigsaw puzzle of rock. The puzzle pieces called tectonic plates sit on the Athena sphere, a layer of earth that shifts and flows 60 to 450 miles below the earth. surface. Rocks in the Athenosphere under so much pressure that they move in and out of solid form.

Sometimes there are solid rock, sometimes liquid magma. Resting atop this constantly shifting layer, the tectonic plates slide over, under, and past one another. Japan has been shaped by these immense forces more than most countries. Just off its eastern coast, massive sections of Earth's lithosphere

being forced beneath the country in a process called subduction. As the subducting plates descend into the Athenosphere, some of the rock melts, forming magma. Over millennia, this molten rock pushes upward through the crust, erupting as lava and creating volcanoes. It's the same upwelling magma that's formed and carved Japan's breathtaking mountains and also fuels the earthquakes that shake the islands. Unlike in the United States, where earthquakes, big ones anyway, are mostly confined to California and Alaska. There's no place in Japan that is not affected by this geological push and pull.

As an archipelago cluster of islands, Japan sits atop one of the most active tectonic regions in the world. The largest of Japan's islands, Hanchu, is in an especially precarious position, straddling the boundary between the Eurasian and North American plates, to the east, North American, and Pacific plates meet along a section of the seafloor called the Japan Trench, where the Pacific Plate slides beneath the North American Plate in a subduction fault. Sounds harmless enough, especially when you realize the Pacific Plate creeps westward, at only about three and a half inches a year, but tectonic plates do not slide smoothly. They stick, right? Friction.

And on a scale as large as the tectonic. plate, even a tiny bit of motion combined with that stickiness, can build up an enormous amount of energy. So how does this work? As the Pacific plate slides beneath the North American plate, it catches the North American plate's edge. Over time, the movement of the Pacific plate pulls the North American plate downward. The upper plate begins to bend, curving at the fault, and forming a deep ocean trench. Tension builds between the two, potential energy grows. When the potential energy in the fault becomes greater than the force that holds the plates together, the top plate breaks free, and springs upward. The subducting plate surges forward. And a great deal of energy is released,

and that energy causes the earth to shake. Here's a way to picture it, kind of. Imagine a 13-inch, two-and-one, silicone double dildo. Let's call it the jock, because that's what they call it, at the online sex toy shop where I found it, Healthy and Active.com. And you're trying to push this thing, this dildo across your grandma's unpolished, well-worn, hardwood dining room, table. The jock, that 13-inch double dildo, two dildos in one, represents the Pacific plate. Your grandma's table is a North American plate. And imagine it's humid out. And the dildo is a bit sticky because you didn't wash it up like you should have after you used it last, and there's some dried-up lube on it. And you're trying to push this sticky, dirty, double dildo across

your grandma's rough-worn table. And if you're grossed out by this analogy, well, check this out. Originally, I was going to use your grandma's butthole as a second plate in this analogy, but then I decided to class it up a little bit. Now, why did you need to know that? You didn't. You definitely didn't, but I wanted you to. Anyway, you're pushing this dildo, and it doesn't just slide gracefully across the table.

No, friction is not the friend of the double dildo, and the jock gets stuck. And over time, as you continue to push the jock, it bends up a little bit in the middle, because the tip is sticking to the table, and the double dildo is storing up more and more energy, like a compressed spring, and you just keep pushing and pushing this thing,

more and more pressure. And eventually that 13-8 and... inch cock monstrosity snaps forward, friction gives way, all the built-up energy is released in an instant, that sudden snap is the earthquake. More of a cockquake in this analogy, but you get it. And the strength of the resulting earthquake depends on how much energy had built up in the fault before it budged, how much of the fault slipped, and how far it moved. Basically, how much did the jock, the double 13-inch dildo, bend before it shot forward

into your grandma's butt hole? I mean, across her table. How far did it shoot forward? How quickly? did he go balls deep? I mean, you know what I mean? As a result of this subterranean motion, Japan experiences a tremor somewhere within its borders every five minutes or so. Most of those, too small for humans to feel.

Of the 2,000 or so each year that are strong enough to be felt, most are small tremors, they rattle dishes, set off car alarms, maybe knock down some books from a shelf, but that's about it. Using the moment magnitude scale, a system gauges the amount of energy released by an earthquake and assigns it a number, anything that would disrupt a home like that would be around a five. The moment magnitude scale, by the way, gives a more reliable estimate of earthquake size for bigger earthquakes, earthquake 6.5 and up than the Richter scale.

The great Tohoku earthquake, far more powerful than anything previously recorded in Japan. It was a 9.1. And on that moment magnitude scale, each whole number increases the energy released by roughly 32 times. So a 6.0 earthquake is 30 times as powerful as a 5.0 earthquake. and due to the compounding effect of 32 times 32 times 32 times 32 plus a little extra, a 9.1 quake is 1,412,537 times stronger than the 5 point earthquake I mentioned in terms of total energy release. Holy shit, right? It's like a 5.0 was someone just kind of like gently nudging the jock, that big old double dildo across table.

A 9.1 was like a superhero just fucking thrown at your grandma's butthole. I mean, throwing it across the table. nobody thought this could happen. Before 2011, most scientists believed the Japan trench could never produce an earthquake stronger than a magnitude of 7.5. The fault was considered relatively slippy, slippery. That is, the Pacific plate usually slipped beneath the North American plate

without building up too much friction. In other words, the table was not as rough as grandmas. The double dildo didn't have as much dried lube on it, and the dildo slid across the table pretty fucking gently for the most part. But slipperiness alone could not prevent disaster. On March 9, 2011, the upper plate lurched forward, producing a magnitude 7.2 quake, major event in its own right, three more large quakes, each above a magnitude 6, followed that same day. But the big one, the real big one, was still on the way.

On March 11th, at 2.46 p.m. local time, a magnitude 9.1 quake that is fucking insane, shook the earth from crust to core through seismic waves. Some of these waves called surface waves, roll along Earth's crust, rattling dishes, knocking books off shelves. There are two types of surface waves. Love waves, they shake from side to side, while Rayleigh waves roll in circles, creating an up and down motion in the surface. By the way, that's what the internet where I found is, these waves are pronounced Rayleigh. Looks like Raleigh to me, but okay. Other waves travel deeper. Secondary waves shake solid rock within the planet, primary waves, aka P waves, travel through the mantle and core, typically causing little damage

at the surface. Secondary and primary waves travel at a different speed. P waves are the fastest, up to 3.7 miles per second through the crust, 8 miles per second through the core. And this is what gives us humans our best shot of protecting ourselves from earthquakes. When earthquake monitoring stations detect P waves, they can trigger early warning systems. These crucial seconds allow people to turn off motors, pause surgeries, pull cars over to the side of the road, take cover before the more destructive surface waves arrive. Elevators can halt no. open doors, subway trains can slow to a stop. And Japan had invested heavily in detection and protection systems. After the deadly earthquake in Kobe in 1995, the nation spent the next 16

years reinforcing bridges, retrofitting buildings with earthquake-resistant technology and developing early warning networks. And when the Tohoku quake struck, this system worked. Towns near the epicenter received warnings 15 seconds before the tremors. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it was enough to prevent cars and trains from crashing, keep people from being trapped in elevator, and it gave others a moment to take cover. The early warning system functioned perfectly in the Fukushima or Fukushima prefecture as well. When the first seismic waves reached the Daiichi plant,

fail-save system shut down the reactors, when the prolonged shaky knocked out external power lines, backup generators automatically powered instrument panels and kept coolant circulating. For a brief moment, seemed like a larger disaster had been averted. But the problem is that earthquakes don't just shake the ground. They also displace massive amounts of water.

When the sea floor abruptly shifts, it can push the ocean above it upward, creating waves that race outward in all directions. And these waves, these are the baddest motherfuckers of all waves, are called tsunamis, giant walls of water that can travel hundreds of miles per hour in the deep ocean. In the open ocean, a tsunami moves incredibly fast. As I mentioned, up to 500 miles per hour, but on the surface these waves are pretty small, usually only a few feet high, and they can be separated in time by as much as an hour. far out at sea, tsunami waves can pass almost unnoticed underneath boats. But unlike normal waves, they involve the entire water column from surface to sea floor, carrying immense energy across the ocean. And when a massive column of the entire ocean is surging towards land at a breakneck speed, well, that's a big fucking problem. As the tsunami reaches shallower water near land,

it begins to slow down. The shallower the water is, the slower the waves are. But as they slow down, they grow taller. To illustrate this, let's use an example many of us have probably seen or been a part of at some point in our lives. Imagine an entire classroom of kids running in line, like in a single line, towards a playground. If the first kid in line stops or even just slows down dramatically, the kids behind will crash into the first kid and the kids behind them will crash into them and so on. Well, the same thing happens with water. As the front of the wave slows, the water behind it piles on. All that water surging forward needs to go somewhere so it goes upward, making the tsunami taller. With the kids in a class analogy, the worst thing that happens is that

they fall over. Well, actually, that's not true. I guess the worst thing that would happen would be that the kids who fall in the front, they get trampled to death by the kids behind them who just don't stop fucking running for some reason. And the kids start forming a gory kid pile, climbing higher and higher because, you know, the kids behind them, they just keep running and they just keep trampling because they've lost their fucking minds, and now they're worse than ferald. They're psychotic and disturbingly hyper-focused on making it to the goddamn playground as quickly as possible.

A tsunami, even more hyper-focused than psychotic. One cubic yard of water, enough to equal about the size of a washing machine, weighs almost 1,700 pounds. Crazy, right? Water is so dense. Rushing water, just six inches deep, if it's moving fast enough,

is strong enough to sweep adults off of their feet. Maybe weak clumsy adults, but still, a foot of rushing water, can carry away a car, maybe just a really old geometro or Suzuki's swift hatchback, but still intense. And although a tsunami near the shore is moving significantly slower than it was at scene, it's still moving faster than a car on a highway, usually about 100 miles an hour. Right? In other words, the tsunami strikes land like a line of trucks, thousands, millions of trucks all driving side to side like a motorized wall moving at top speed. And there's probably a lot of creepy shit

in those trucks. They're not being driven by nice, hardworking men and women doing a valuable service, for society. Some of them are being driven by sharks and squids and jellyfish and octopuses, and maybe it's called octopi, and big crabs that shoot like ocean, look like ocean spiders. And I don't know, weird monsters from deep down in the trenches that you don't want to fucking know about. But seriously, it's terrifying. I truly hate the concept of a tsunami so much. And like earthquakes, Japan no stranger to tsunamis. The word itself tsunami is Japanese. While tsunamis can occur anywhere in the world, the shape of the coast in the Tohoku region makes them particularly devastating.

The northeastern shore of Honshu, often called the Sun Riku coast, zigzags in and out forming jagged shapes that resemble the teeth of a saw. Riaz, a word for riverbeds that have been flooded by the sea, form deep harbors that reach inland. These riverbeds provide a perfect path for a tsunami to flow up into towns and along mountain sides, potentially trapping people before they can get to higher ground. That means that people have to be well prepared. From an early age, children in Tohoku are taught.

an evacuation strategy called Tendenko. The strategy is actually born from a pretty ruthless principle, the idea that precious time can be lost when parents go searching for the kids or when neighbors stop and check in on each other. Instead, people have to act and act quickly to save themselves and just think primarily of themselves. Many who live in the area know that when a strong earthquake strikes, a tsunami is likely following close behind. The mandate is thus, get the fuck out immediately when shit starts to shake.

Everyone is taught to evacuate to a safe place Not to stop and not to look out for others Sorry about your wheelchair, Nana. Sorry about the gout, Papa, best luck. I'll never forget you. If every person follows Tendenko after all, then nobody has to worry about anyone being left behind. Misa Koshita, a grandmother in the Osce,

would remember hearing these words of wisdom when she was a child. Never call out to others when you flee from a tsunami because you will find yourselves standing around talking to each other. Just run away and never, ever turn back. I like it. She sounds like a survivor. Another Oshoshi resident, Yukara, or you, excuse me, Yukari, Kurosawa was told a simpler version when she was young. If a birth, big earthquake hits and the ocean draws back, run. And many people did exactly this, or at least they tried to. But for some, the water found them too fast and was simply too powerful. And those who didn't run, they truly

had no chance. Too many people believe that their homes or schools or places of work that survived tsunamis before, you know, would survive this one. But, you know, with a few exceptions, they would be wrong. And then when the survivors managed to make it up to emergency response centers, when they met up with their family and friends, or as was often the case, found that they had simply disappeared, maybe to reappear, maybe not, and waited, huddled for warmth and gyms and office buildings, they got the news. If everything that hadn't already happened wasn't bad enough, and it certainly was, the Fukushima nuclear power plant had started to melt down. Let's now head to today's time-suck timeline to learn more.

Right after today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space hazard on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad free, get episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to our sponsors, and now it is timeline time. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline.

At 2.46 p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011, an area of the North American plate about 190 miles long broke free from the Pacific plate. The fault was packed with slippery clay. Oh, and by the way, I have to get this out of my head, just because I, this way my brain works. It's a very different setup. It's very, very different when I'm recording remotely. So if I have a little like pauses in my speech, it's because it is far more difficult to see my notes and record than it normally is. So it's just probably no one notices. But in my head, I'm like, ah, I sound a little different. And I want to tell people why. Okay.

I just had to get that out. Anyway, this fault was packed with slippery clay, which acted like the water on a slip and slide, allowing the Pacific plate to quickly leap more than 160 feet westward, much farther than anyone had thought it could go. It was like the jock, the big old double dildo, went from knocking on Nana's back door. to just fucking just destroying it in a nanosecond. I mean, it shot across her table and almost broke the table in a nanosecond after getting really stuck. Stuck it had ever been, you know, when you're trying to push it across.

Energy surged from the rupture like a bomb blast, racing toward the shore, nearly four miles per second, despite the earthquakes that had preceded it on March 9th. Nobody saw this coming, not on this ordinary seeming day. On that Friday afternoon, many kids were nearing the end of their last day of classes, since in Japan, March actually marks the end of the school year. Office workers, meanwhile, were grinding through afternoon meetings and paperwork, stores were preparing for the afternoon rush, ready to sell people late lunches, midday snacks, and coffees. Then the earthquake siren sounded.

Seconds later, the ground began to shake, really shake. Glass shattered, roadways crumbled, and telephone and power poles toppled to the ground. Three prefectures along the northeastern coast of the island, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, were closest to the fault and took the hardest hit. But since, like we said, Japan is no stranger to earthquakes, pretty much everyone knew what to do. As the alarm sounded, people followed emergency guidelines and dropped to the floor, sheltering under desks and tables as they waited for the shaking to stop. And they waited. And they waited some more.

Normally an earthquake lasts for a few seconds, maybe as many as 30. Big earthquake might go on for a full minute, but not this time. Full minute ticked by. Shaking still had not stopped. In fact, it had gotten worse. Then a second full minute of quaking followed. then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and finally a sixth. Just imagine the ground beneath your feet shaking for that long.

Like, you know, two songs back to back, two average-length songs back to back, and it's just fucking constantly shaking that whole time, shaking in a way that you can rip your home apart. I imagine that would feel less like an earthquake and more like the apocalypse, like the earth itself was being ripped apart and destroyed. I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life, a city official from Sendai told a reporter in disbelief that night. I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking and getting stronger.

In Tokyo, about 180 miles from the epicenter, skyscrapers designed to withstand earthquakes, thankfully bent rather than broke as the ground beneath them rolled, looking like trees waving in a frothing sea. How terrifying for any one of those buildings. I imagine those buildings were full of screams and tears. But, man, huge props to the engineers who developed the technology to withstand earthquakes. Otherwise, it's, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, could have died in this disaster. just because of the density of the population.

Indeed, most of the severe damage caused by the quake was the result of liquefaction, that ground-rolling phenomenon, we just mentioned. Cities built near major bodies of water often create new land by dumping soil and rubble into bays and ocean inlets. Under normal conditions, this reclaimed land is perfectly stable, a good base for buildings and parks. Excuse me, but when an earthquake shakes, all that sandy soil, things get messy. This was what a woman named Yukari Kurosawa, noticed, when she was working. working at a hospital in Oshushi, a coastal town in Owaiti Prefecture. Everything started to shake, even her heavy desk that she struggled to move.

When a coworker shouted at her to get out of the building, she moved to the parking lot and sought that the ground beneath the pavement had essentially liquefied. The asphalt was rolling and heaving like an ocean. It's fucking crazy. Indeed, this was happening all around Japan. Sections of parking lot and road suddenly transformed from solid ground into what now looked like rippling liquid. In Chiba City, where parkland had been created on a lot of land.

landfill dumped into Tokyo Bay, the sidewalks rippled like fabric. And just outside of Chiba, at a refinery owned by the company Cosmo Oil, the metal legs beneath a huge storage tank, filled with water snapped, sending it and crashing into a pipeline carrying fuel. As a mixture of propane and butane poured from the broken pipe, flames spread across it, crawling along the ground until they reached the nearby fuel tank. It exploded, spreading the fire to another tank, and then another, and another. It would be 10 days before firefighters were able to to put out the fire completely. In Fukushima Prefecture, the shaking rattled Sukagawa, a town about 40 miles from the coast, sent the town's Fujinuma Dam, sliding nearly 15 feet downhill, 15 feet,

and water from the reservoir behind it began to spill over the top. About 20 minutes after the quake, the water pouring over the dam caused it to collapse entirely, flooding nearby homes, killing eight people. When the shaking subsided, about 26,600 houses had been destroyed, and 1,476 people were dead. Japan was no pun intended, truly, rattled. Across the country, people began to take stock of the damage, checking in with friends, family, you know, neighbors. The violent shaking had shattered glass, fragmented roads,

toppled trees, signs, and buildings, collapsed bus shelters, homes, and sheds. Indoors, rooms that had been perfectly neat and orderly, just five minutes before, looked like they'd been ransacked by gangs and disorderly criminals. Bookshelves and dressers had capsized, scattering contents everywhere. and no one knew that for many a lot more damage was coming.

They didn't yet know what had happened far beneath the Earth's surface. When the Japan trench ruptured, the quake actually shifted the shape of the fucking planet. A NASA scientist later calculated that the movement of rock, magma, and soil, changed Earth's center of gravity, causing the planet to spin a micro-second faster, tiny fraction of a second, but still something measurable. And Japan had changed too. When the Pacific plate slid westward and the North American plate sprang back towards its original shape, parts of Hanshu, especially along the coast, moved as much as 13 feet east.

The land also rose and fell, as the coastline flattened roughly 250 miles ashore, about the distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., sank by roughly two feet. At the same time, about 60 miles offshore, a stretch of seafloor 190 miles long jolted upward nearly 30 feet. All that movement pushed millions of gallons of seawater out of place, and that water had to go somewhere. Like all tsunamis, the waves generated by the great Tohoku earthquake traveled across the ocean in a liquid column. The tsunami would actually reach Crescent City, California, more than 5,000 miles away as an 8-foot-high wave about 10 hours later. And there, sadly, 25-year-old Dustin Douglas Weaver would become the first person killed by a tsunami on the west coast of North America since 1964 when that big wave grabbed him and ripped him out to sea. his body wouldn't be found for three weeks.

In 18 hours, the tsunami would hit the Solzburger ice shelf in Antarctica with enough force to knock loose an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan. A five-foot-tall wave completely submerged Midway Atoll's reef inlets and Spit Island, killing more than 110,000 nesting seabirds at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Also on the day of the quake, the waters of several fjords across Norway, on the other side of the world, appeared to seethe as if boiling, and formed waves that rolled onto shores. After two years of research into these incidents in Norway,

scientists concluded that the seismic energy of the quake generated sache waves, these standing waves that will slosh back and forth thousands of miles away. But long before all that, it would strike Japan. Of course, following the principle of Tendenko, the evacuation strategy where everybody hurries to a safe place individually, everything should have been okay. After all, everybody knew that tsunamis often follow quakes, so what would be the problem?

The problem is that Tendeko is easier to follow in theory, much easier than in reality. The great Tohoku earthquake struck during the workday, and after the shaking stop, many residents' first impulse was to head home, check on their loved ones, figure out the damage that had been done to their properties, and regroup. How do you fight that human instinct? Added to this is the fact that many Japanese families live in multi-generational households, meaning that people will worry about elderly parents and grandparents who may have gotten caught in the rolling tides of asphalt and concrete if they've been outside, or, maybe they were pinned to the ground by falling bookshelves and doors. Many people, therefore, rushed in the wrong directions toward coastal towns and homes. Some people were also confused by glitch in the earthquake early warning system. By nature, earthquake and tsunami warning systems have to act quickly with limited data. In the first minutes after the fault ruptured, the

JMA, the Japan Meteorological Agency, estimated the magnitude of the quake at 7.9, which, you know, obviously wasn't. It was far more powerful than that. But with that prediction, three minutes after the quake began, the agency issued a tsunami warning with estimates of waves up to only 20 feet high in Miyagi Prefecture and up to 10 feet high in Awate and Fukushima. For Awate and Fukushima, where most seawalls were around 20 feet tall, this didn't sound too bad. Even if the wave swelled to 20 feet, the barriers would still hold. 25 feet even should only cause minor flooding and damage. They had no fucking idea that a big old thick 40-foot wave, something that could topple the seawalls and sweep way everything in its path was already on its way. As people rushed home, the tsunami swept past

a GPS buoy, which measured its height. Based on the measurements, JMA issued a new warning, about 28 minutes after the quake, predicting waves higher than 30 feet in Miyagi and 20 feet in Awate and Fukushima. But most people are already making plans based off of the first alerts info. In the town of Ishi no Maki, a dead center along the coast of Miyagi, the students and teachers at Okawa Elementary, which I mentioned earlier, did what they always did for quakes. They gathered their students and searched for safety. One of these students there was Tetsuyaatadano, a stocky 11-year-old boy with close-cropped hair, an air of mild, amused mischief about him. Every morning he made the 20-minute walk from his house to school with his nine-year-old sister Mina along the embankment

of the river. On the day of the quake, it was the 40th birthday of their mother, Shiro. It was going to be a little family party at the house at night, but otherwise it was an unremarkable Friday afternoon. At 2.45 p.m., the school bus was waiting in the car park with its engine running. A few of the younger pupils had already climbed in. But most of the kids were still in their classrooms, finishing up the last school business at the week. The six-year class was singing happy birthday to one of their classmates, a little girl named Mono. In the middle of the song, the earthquake struck. Instead of the rapid up and down shaking, we might imagine the building shook slowly from side to side, which is maybe more terrifying.

In Tetsuya's class, the fifth-year students were getting. getting ready to go home for the day when their teachers told them to hold on to their desks. When the shaking stopped, the school building was evacuated. Children lined up by class, given hard helmets, and they marched outside. Some little girls were crying. Little boy wondered out loud if his game console was okay. Oh my God, in the middle of all that terror, that it's adorable. I could have been that little boy.

If some earthquake would have been fucking up my school when I was in fourth or fifth grade, knocking shit over and off the walls, one of my first thoughts would have likely been, Oh my God, my Nintendo. I need to get home and check on my Nintendo. So there were more aftershocks at 303 p.m. at 306 p.m., 312 p.m. And then the teachers knew, thanks to meteorological warnings, that the big one was still coming, the tsunami. The question was now, what to do about it? They consulted the school's education plan found the following vague language.

Primary evacuation place, school grounds, secondary evacuation place, in case of tsunami, vacant land near school or park, etc. These instructions were not that helpful. The reference to a park, et cetera, made little sense out in the countryside where there were fields and hills but no city-designated parks. There was plenty of vacant land, but what part of that vacant land should they head to? There was one obvious spot to take shelter. The school was immediately in front of a forested hill, over 200 meters high, about 700 feet, excuse me, at its highest point. Until a few years ago, the children had gone up there as part of their science lessons, where they had cultivated a patch of Shatake mushrooms.

Luckily, it was also a climb that even the littlest kids could manage. The students, too, had picked up on the advantages of getting uphill. But then when they begged their teachers to let them go, they were given terrible advice. They were told to wait. As the teachers and administrators argued about where to go, right, they were not following that principle, just fucking move. Parents and grandparents began to gather in the school's flat and low-elevation courtyard. Locals, too, began to trickle in since the Okawa Elementary was designated as an official evacuation site. Parents wanted to get their kids home.

but the school staff told them to stay. Some wanted to take their kids up that hill, but the staff said they hadn't made a decision yet about where to go. Most locals wanted to stay in the school. Overwhelmingly, they were older and male, and their voices rose above the rest. As people argued, the idea of the tsunami became more and more abstract, and what felt real to most of the people gathered there

was the immediate situation. Parents, grandparents, and children were getting cold, sharing scarves, and hand-womers. Then, as the minutes wore on, everyone started to get a little bored, waiting outside for something that seemed like maybe it wasn't even going to happen. Then just a few blocks away at 3.30 p.m., an elderly man named Kuzul Takahashi fled his home next to the river. Like many others, he'd ignored the warnings until he saw a massive undulating black tide of seawater streaming over the embankment beside his house.

Seemed to be coming from below the earth, as well as across it. Metal manhole covers, and the road were being lifted upwards by rising water. Mud was oozing up between the cracks that the earthquake had opened in the road. The city was being torn apart. Takashi or Takahashi directed his car towards the place he thought made the most sense, the hill behind the school. On his way, he saw friends and acquaintances standing and chatting. He rolled down his window and shouted, there's a tsunami coming, get out. He passed his cousin and his cousin's wife and delivered the same warning.

They waved, smiled, and ignored him. Then as he parked his car next to the school, he saw some kids running up towards that hill. Tetsuya and his friend Daisuke Kono were at the front of the group. their little lakes pumping hard just past a traffic island where the road met the new Kitakami, Great Bridge, Tetsuya sought. Liquid death. Not the heavily marketed canned water. Actual liquid death.

A terrifying mass of black water rushing along the main road ahead of them. Some of those at the front of the line froze in the face of the wave. Others, including Tetsuya and Daisuki, turned and ran back the way they'd come. The rest of the children were continuing to hurry towards the main road, and the little ones towards the back were visibly puzzled by the side of the older children, scrambling in the opposite direction. The tsunami had arrived and nobody knew where to go. Soon Tetsuya and Daisuki made it to the foot of the hill, the steepest, most thickly forested section of the slope. They charged up. At some point, Tetsuya realized that Datsuya had fallen. He tried to pull his friend up,

but he couldn't do it. The water was still coming. He turned and scrambled up the hill alone. As his feet pounded the hillside, he looked back over his shoulder, saw the darkness of the tsunami rising behind him. Soon it was at his feet, then it covered his calves. A moment later, it was up to the small of his back, then to his chest. Then he got trapped between a rock and a tree, the water rising all around him, and then everything went black. From the hillside that overlooked Kamia, the neighborhood of Ishikonomaki, where Okawa Elementary School was located, Waichi, Nagano, and his wife, Hideko, watched as the water swept the

impulsing surges over the embankment and across the village in the fields. All they could hear was the sound of buildings, cars, and roads being pulverized, earth groaning as it sunk, cars moaning as they were tossed by the waves. but then they heard another sound. The voices have scared, panicked, and sometimes dying children. Help, help, they called. But the couple couldn't see them in the dark slurry. As they looked on, their voices grew fainter.

My God, that would fucking haunt me. Meanwhile, back at the school, miraculously, Tetsuya Tadano, was still alive. He awoke on the hill, blinded by mud, and completely stuck. There was debris on top of him and something else, something wriggling. Turned out to be his buddy, fellow 11-year-old Kohi Takahashi, also still alive. Cohay's life had been saved at a household refrigerator that had sailed past him in the dark water he had managed to climb in and ride it like a boat until it dumped him on top of his friend. Cohe tugged his friend free and then the two stood assessing the damage. Rare bit of good news in the story.

The two boys looked out at a wasteland. Just a few minutes earlier, Kamea had been a succession of hamlets and beyond them fields, low hills, the swaying curve of the river and finally the Pacific Ocean. After the tsunami, the village, the hamlets, the fields, everything else between the mountains. the hill and the sea was just gone, flattened. Tetsuya's first thought was that he and his friend were already dead, and that they were in some kind of underworld situation, but then he saw the traffic island and realized maybe he was still alive. Then the water, which had receded, began to surge up the hill again as the tsunami was draining back out to sea. The shit was still not over. The two boys tottered up the slope, thankfully made it above it. Tetsuya's face was black and bruised.

Kohay's left wrist was broken, but they were lucky. The wall of water mixed with soil, sewage, oil and rubble had, as I mentioned earlier, killed 74 of the 78 children at the elementary school that day out of 180, oh my God, out of 108 total kids. So 78 of the 108 were there, 74 died. 10 out of 11 teachers working that day also died. And imagine surviving that. Imagine almost everyone you went to school with, sat in classes for years with, played at recess with, had crushes on, had fights with, all the teachers who helped you learn this or that, gone forever, as is the building where you all

built those memories together in other towns. Other people had made sure, had made the same fatal mistake, thinking that the tsunami would not reach them. In the town of Kesenuma, about an hour's drive away from that elementary school, the water first appeared innocuous enough, traveling far inland along the Okawa River. Curious spectators gathered along the concrete walls that lined the banks. They watched as small boats left on the river's banks were swept up and splintered by the power of the water. Still, it seemed unlikely that the river would overflow the high barriers designed to keep it from flooding. But then the water just kept coming and coming in minutes that had breached the walls, moved into the town with deadly speed.

Residents climbed onto the tops of high buildings, looked on in shock as a mass of inky water, littered with bits of building ships and styrofoam cued from a local factory swept away their homes and their neighbors. The water rose over the first and second stories of buildings before it stopped. As a tsunami swept through his home, a man named Toshone. Toshi Kazu Abe caught one last glimpse of his family. I saw the exact moment when my mother was swept away by the wave. She was sitting on her chair, he remembered. My God, watching a wave sweep away your mom,

that would be just so preposterously traumatic. Unless you were like the lucky person that hated your mom. I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to find a bright side. I'm trying to find a possible silver lining. If you really, really hated your mom, then maybe it would be the greatest moment of your life. Right?

Especially if moments before you would thought, God, I fucking hate her. I wish you tsunami would pull her out to sea. Abe, too, was carried away. He was pinned by the rubble, but by a stroke of luck, his head remained above water. Thirty seconds passed by. I knew if I swallowed water I'd be done for. I was able to keep my head up floating out of the water, but I stuck in the rubble and couldn't move a muscle, he would later say.

When the first wave pulled back, the debris around him loosened and he was able to climb into a nearby roof. Took him a moment to realize that what covered in was not just water. He was bleeding everywhere. and then came the fires. Fires broke out when gas tanks and broken fuel lines ignited. Flames spread through the floating rubble and across the oily surface of the water. My God, this is hell. As the fire approached Toshi Kazu Abe, who was freezing on the roof, he had a strange

thought. This may sound crazy to you, and there was no doubt that I was in danger, but I thought to myself that the fire would be kind of warm and cozy, he said later. I wanted to warm myself up, so I'd be able to move and run away quickly. All along the coast of Iwatee, Miyagi. and Fukushima. Those who were lucky enough to escape the floodwater, scramble to high ground, and avoided whatever secondary damage was now ripping through the rubble of their former homes, as well as second and third waves that followed the first wave's path. Fun tsunami fact,

a tsunami is actually a series of waves known as a wave train rather than a single wave. These waves can last for hours, with successive crests arriving minutes to over an hour apart. First wave, also often not the largest, and dangerous waves can continue for 12 hours or longer. I literally did not know that until working on this episode. I was already terrified of a tsunami. They were scarier than I thought. I fucking hate tsunamis. Truly hate them.

Least favorite natural disaster. I would rather be burned alive. Some went to evacuation centers only to find that the centers were in the path of the tsunami. Others who had found shelter had to evacuate again as the fire spread. At sundown, it finally started to snow now. Just one thing after another, what a terrible time for snow, right? Everything's broken or destroyed. Everything's wet.

it's freezing, it's snowing. I'd be like Tetsuya. Are we positive that we're not in hell? Shivering people, many of them without blankets, food, or drinkable water even, searched for dry clothes, huddled together for warmth. Most of them did not know what had happened to their families and friends. The lucky ones had been able to reach their loved ones by cell phone, but only before the tsunami struck. Others wandered through evacuation centers, schools, and hospitals, looking for anyone with news. This was where a 62-year-old grandfather named Ryochi Usazawa found himself. He'd spent that morning working from his home in the town of Ososhi. He had finished writing a report, was happy to have most of his work done before the end of the day so he could spend some

time with his dog, this adorable little Shiba Inu named Taro. After the earthquake hit, he'd headed upstairs to pick up some things that had fallen down, thinking that a tsunami would not reach his home, since one never had in the decades that his family had lived on the property. But then he heard some family members scream, look after Taro as they took off. When he looked back, a muddy surge of water was chasing him up the stairs. He managed to get to the roof with Taro, escaping the first wave just barely, clambered over the rubble between his roof and another building, holding on to a down power line to keep from being swept away. And he clutched his pup the whole time. It's fucking adorable. Bojangles is loving this. At times, Taros' leash and collar would come loose, and time

after time I contemplated how much easier it would be if I left him behind, he later said. But when I saw his whimpering face, I was determined to save him. By the time the second wave came, he had managed to get inside the second floor of the building next to his with his dog. Then the fire started so hot he thought the flames were going to melt the glasses right off his face. This is fucking insane. He and his dog would be rescued from the rooftop of a floating house by firefighters, who took them to an evacuation center at a local community hall. And he would be one of the extremely lucky ones.

He would also be reunited with the rest of his family. They'd all miraculously made it out alive. So many others, not nearly as lucky. Within 30 minutes of being there, two elderly people literally passed away in front of him. I thought, ah, I might die too, he said. A public health nurse brought me some newspaper, and when I wrapped myself with that, it was so warm. Sometime during the night, the snow finally stopped. The entire coastline was without power, no heat, no hot water, no electric lights, though. In all, 154 square miles have been swallowed by

waves and 127,000 homes destroyed. A hundred and twenty-seven thousand homes destroyed. But arguably, the biggest disaster had yet to happen. What will be the worst nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster. And we'll learn all about it after today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked.

Now let's return to March 11, 2011. If the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had a full meltdown, it could mean that Tokyo itself, 150 miles away, would need to be evacuated. Vast swaths of eastern Japan would be rendered uninhabitable for decades. The greater Tokyo area population

is estimated to be in, to be between 37 and 41 million residents, if all of them would have been displaced, where would they have gone? Japan's economy would have been destroyed. While Riochi, Uzazawa, and Toshi Kazuazawa were fighting for survival in the tsunami waters and making their way to evacuation centers,

workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were working frantically in pitch black control rooms, desperately trying to stop a chain reaction that was spinning out of control. A sprawling collection of reactors and support buildings the Fukushima Daiichi plant covered almost one and a half square miles along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Its six nuclear reactors were lined up along the shore behind three long, low buildings that housed turbines.

Four of the six reactors, numbers one through four, fell within the town of Okama to the south. Reactors five and six were part of the town of Futaba, about 500 feet to the north. The reactors were housed in six square buildings that had been painted a cheerful baby blue, a splattering of white on one corner of each building mimic the dappling of sun on the water. Inside each building was a series of containers resting one inside the other like Russian nesting dolls. At the heart of each nest in the innermost container was a nuclear boiling water reactor. Like most power plants, nuclear power plants boil water to create steam that turns turbines. But while other power plants burn oil, gas, or coal to generate the heat that starts the process,

nuclear power plants use uranium. And rather than burn it to release it to release. energy, they use nuclear fission, a process that unlocks the energy stored in the tiny, tiny nucleus of an atom. Let's do a quick little lesson on nuclear fission now. If nothing else, you'll get to hear me fuck up the word nuclear a bunch more times. Truly one of the words, no matter how many times I say it, apparently I still say it wrong to a lot of people. In nuclear fission, the goal is to split the nucleus of an atom in two.

Most nuclear reactors use uranium 235 as fuel. For an atom, uranium 235 is a pretty enormous nucleus, packed with 92 protons, 140s. 43 neutrons. Its large size makes the nucleus of uranium 235, of uranium 235, rather, unstable. And to break it apart, all nuclear operators need to do is add some loose neutrons to the mix. When a neutron traveling at just the right speed strikes a nucleus of a uranium 235 atom, it's absorbed and the atom becomes even more unstable. That causes it to fission, breaking apart into two smaller atoms. But if you could somehow put the two pieces back together, you would discover that your taped together atom weighed less than it did originally.

That missing mass is energy. And that process sets off a chain reaction. When the atom splits, it also sends loose neutrons careening from the break. On average, two neutrons break away from each uranium atom that splits. And those neutrons might hit two more atoms, causing those to split. Those two atoms will each shed two neutrons, leaving four neutrons free to hit four atoms, which will release eight neutrons and on and on. the series of neutrons that I'm swirling around in the reactor grows producing more and more energy.

In a fully functioning nuclear reactor, trillions of atoms are fissioning at any point in time, making a lot of energy. All this sounds pretty straightforward, right? I mean, it actually sounds like sci-fi nonsense to me, but maybe if you have a better understanding of science in general than I do, it sounds straightforward to you. In practice, of course, it's pretty tricky. When neutrons break free during fission,

it's impossible to predict where they will go. They might be launched outward into the shell of the nuclear. reactor, or they might head into the heart of the fuel but still fail to cause other atoms to fission. That means there needs to be some way of ensuring that the reaction will continue. Reactors, like the ones, at Fukushima Daiichi, increased the likelihood that those pinging neutrons will hit another uranium-235 nucleus by slowing them down. They slow the neutrons down by putting fuel into pellets, which are stacked into rods and held together by a thin metal shell in the reactor.

Each rod is surrounded by water. And really what exactly are these rods? I don't fucking know, okay? Let's just say they're made out of unicorn horns covered in pixie dust. As many of us know, water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. And I do know that. I learned that in science class. And hydrogen atoms, oh my God, and hydrogen atoms, as it turns out, are excellent at slowing down speedy neutrons.

Good job, hydrogen. With just a single proton, the hydrogen nucleus has no particles that can be broken apart. When a speedy neutron hits a hydrogen nucleus, the hydrogen atoms jump, absorbing some of the neutron's momentum, but they don't break. Indeed, water is the workhorse of any nuclear power plant. Slows down the freed neutrons so the chain reaction is more likely to occur, but it also absorbs the heat generated by fission and evaporates it into steam, which turns the turbine to generate electricity.

Carrying that heat away in the form of steam does another important thing, cools down the reactor so it does not melt. And all of this is happening, or not happening, if the atoms don't split, means that nuclear scientists need to be monitoring the situation constantly, making sure that the reaction does not fizzle entirely or that things do not spiral out of control. If Homer Simpson isn't paying close enough attention to what's going on,

all of Springfield could be lost. But truly, if things seem like they're starting to get out of control, reactor operators will insert cadmium rods to absorb neutrons and slow shit down. And for a long time, the reactors at Fukushima were doing just a lot. fine. Before the quake, three of the reactors there, numbers one, two, and three had been critical, generating a little more than 2,000 megawatts or approximately 2 billion watts of electricity, enough to power about 400,000 homes, while reactors 4, 5, and 6 were down for maintenance and inspection. But when the earthquake struck, it shook Daichi with far more force than the plant was designed to withstand.

That day, there were about 6,400 workers in the massive complex. That's a lot of fucking people. They grabbed hard hats and scrambled under desk to wait it out. But then in the main office building, ceiling panels rained down, trapping workers under their desks. Lights crashed from the ceiling, and now they just couldn't shelter in place. An earthquake of this magnitude meant that the reactors had to be stabilized before the power went out. In the control room for reactors 1 and 2, each control room was split between two reactors. Even as the room pitched and swayed, the operators moved quickly to monitor an emergency procedure known as a scram. In this procedure, control rods automatically shoot up into the reactor cores, putting a damper on the movement of neuro-of-earm.

neutrons between the fuel rods. Operators checked the backup cooling systems to make sure that they were working properly. In the control room for reactors three and four, operators couldn't check the backup systems until the quake had passed. In the end, though, the control rods were in and the chain reactions had been paused. Everything seemed fine. But then the workers had to prepare for the coming tsunami. The plant was located just feet from the ocean, which meant everyone needed to move to high ground

ASAP. About 200 people who were on the ocean side of the plant made a dash for the gates, but the gates were not opening. Not because they were stuck, but because the security guards would not open them until each person had gone through a metal detector. For fuck's sake. Really? Now? People who just cannot think outside of the box in atypical and or extreme situations, people who just live by rules or rules, just enforced in orders, and just can't bend to unusual circumstances, they have to be some of the most annoying, frustrating people on earth. Did you not feel the ground shaking for six minutes, Captain dipshit? Did you not hear the tsunami warning? Fuck the metal detector.

One worker later recalled the panic building among those trapped outside the gate. Let us out of here. A tsunami may be coming, they yelled. They worried that if they tried to climb the fence to flee, they could be prosecuted. Eventually, though, the guards did allow them to pass through, but they lost valuable time. On the inland side of the plant, workers also gathered at the exit gates. Another worker, Kai Watanabe, would later remember people standing in an orderly line to turn in their dosometers, instruments that measure radiation exposure, and waiting as their supervisors counted the workers to make sure no one was missing. My God, so much red tape. Would they do that if the plant was on fucking fire, and the flames were about to engross them? Some people probably would.

Such a different mentality than what I have. I've always seen rules and just laws, frankly, as suggestions. Suggestions of how one should act in an ideal situation. But if the situation changes, well, so does my observance of the law or rule. Quick case and point. The traffic lights at this one intersection near my house have been fucked up for years. The city has people inspect it, work on it literally like every year

for at least the past 10 years have done this. And for reasons, I just don't understand they just can't seem to fix it. Sometimes it'll work for a few months, but then it'll revert back to its old fuck-ups

and it'll do this thing where you'll have a green light and I'm not exaggerating for maybe two seconds. I'm talking tops. Before one car has fully gone through, it'll already be turning yellow. I've actually seen the front car

at this intersection. It goes green, they start to go, it goes yellow and they stop. And they're just like, oh, I guess I just don't get to go through now. And then it'll sit on red for what feels like several minutes. And it's not a busy intersection. And so I run that red light all the time. If no one's coming the other way, after stopping, just look, I just fucking drive through.

But if I'm sitting behind somebody else, like 90% of the time at least, they will just wait endlessly for the light to change. They just cannot bring themselves to break the law and just blow through the light. It's not red. I cannot drive. I must not do that. If I'm in a nuclear power plant after a massive earthquake and tsunami is coming, I don't give a fuck what the rules are.

I'm either trying to keep it from melting down, if I think I can help, do that, or I'm just running out of that motherfucker. You can file your exit protocols in the suck my dick folder. Elsewhere on the complex, hundreds of employees who had been designated as emergency workers headed for an earthquake-proof structure called the seismic-isolated building, which was set back from the water. To get in, they had to navigate more than 60 feet of stairs

that had been covered in slippery sludge spewing from a ruptured ground pipe, Meanwhile, on the second floor of the emergency response center, the plant superintendent, Massa, or Masao Yoshida, was trying to get a handle in the situation. When the first two tsunami warnings, predicting 10 and 20-foot waves were announced on TV, he ordered all workers to evacuate to either the seismic, isolated building, or higher ground. He assumed that the biggest risk would be people who were outside getting swept up in the water. Not that the wave would reach the reactors themselves,

but then a third tsunami warning came in, predicting a 32-foot-tall wave. Uh-oh, that a warning arrived too late. At 3.27 p.m., just 41 minutes after the earthquake, the first wave crashed into the Fukushima shore. Reactors 1 through 4 sat 33 feet above sea level. Reactors 5 and 6 were at 42 feet above. All were saved from the first wave, which was only 18 feet high, but that wave was part of a wave train. And when the second wave barreled in 10 minutes later, it was closer to 50 feet tall. Fuck my life, I'd want to kill myself if I saw that wave coming from me.

or I might just have a heart attack and drop dead. It rolled over the plants 30-foot seawall easily, sweeping a tractor trailer into the building complex and pulling a massive oil tank into the ocean when it receded. Water swamped the turbine buildings on the ocean side of the reactors, climbed 18 feet up the outside of units 1 through 4. Two workers, ages only 21 and 24, went missing after the tsunami hits, or later found dead in the basement of a turbine building.

Crazy that they were the only two workers who died directly from the incident. At 336, the lights on the control panels in Unit 1 and Unit 2 control room began to flicker. Then they snapped off. The operators were plunged into darkness on one side of the room. On the other, dim, emergency lighting cast a glow over the stunned crew. An eerie silence settled as they contemplated what came next. The operators knew that the scram was only the first step in reaching what's known as cold shutdown when the temperature of the core reaches reaches below boiling.

Until the atoms inside fully stopped shedding heat, which can take about 24 hours, cooling systems need to run or the water in the reactor will quickly boil off leaving the fuel exposed. Without water to keep the fuel rods cool, temperatures in the core can climb as high as 5,100 degrees Fahrenheit. And that is hot enough to melt the fuel rods and allow them to sink right through the bottom of the reactor, triggering a meltdown. Luckily, all three of the scrammed reactors had emergency cooling systems. Units 2 and 3 each had a reactor core isolation cooling system, RCIC, it's called Rixie. the Rixie system pumped water from the storage tanks called suppression pools into the reactor, but Unit 1, the oldest reactor in the plant, had an outdated cooling system known as an isolation

condenser, which is basically a set of two valves, one to let the steam from the core into the system, and one to allow cool water to drip back into the core. Those should have been totally operational thanks to backup generators. But they had taken a severe beating from a major earthquake. Now in the Emergency Response Center, Superintendent Yoshita knew that they were in serious trouble. he immediately notified the company's headquarters in Tokyo that two of Daichi's reactors, one and two, had likely lost their cooling. But Tokyo was nearly 200 miles away, and between the plant and any outside help lay a region

that had just been devastated by a massive flood. The employees at Fukushima Daiichi were on their own. To make matters worse, phone lines that should have allowed the emergency response team to communicate with the operators in the control rooms, those were down. The only way to communicate was in person. So workers had to carry messages by foot back and forth between the emergency response center and the control rooms.

This is a shit show. Along their route, manhole covers had been blown the fuck off by the force of the waves, turning the roads between the buildings into an obstacle course of open holes lurking beneath standing water. Jesus. What's more, hundreds of aftershocks continue to rattle Fukushima, threatening to shake broken pieces loose from buildings at any time.

How are they supposed to get anything done? Yoshida and his team started to brainstorm. They didn't have much to work with. Much of the heavy equipment outside the reactors have been swept away by the waves, a tractor trailer have been pushed across an access door to unit four, and a storage tank blocked the road leading to units one through four. And if that wasn't bad enough, everything on the bottom floor of the reactor buildings, including the diesel generators, they so desperately needed to run the reactors, were submerged in saltwater. And despite

hundreds of hours of emergency training, no one really knew what to do next. Using flashlights in the dark, windowless rooms, they combed through operating manuals. But nobody had ever written anything about what to do when a nuclear reactor lost every source. of power simultaneously. What's more, it wasn't like they could stop worrying about the ones that weren't operating. While units 4, 5, and 6 were shut down before the quake and tsunami, those three reactors still had spent fuel in storage pools, spent fuel that needed to be kept cool. Fortunately, a backup generator in Unit 6 had been installed beyond the reach of the flood.

They could run a line to that generator to keep Unit 5 running too. And because Unit 3 still had battery power, operators were able to restart its Rixie system and knew that water was flowing into the reactor. The real problems were units 1, 2, and 4, and there was very little time to figure out a solution. At 4.42 p.m., about an hour after the power went out, operators managed to get a reading off a water level indicator inside the reactor in unit 1. Measuring how much water had been lost since the tsunami,

they did some calculations and realized that they had less than 2 hours before the water level in the reactor dropped below the tops of the fuel rods. Once that happened, the rods would begin to melt. At 5.19 p.m., operators went back to Unit 1 to try to get another reading from the water meter, when they opened the double door to the building, the Geiger-Muller counter, they were carrying to measure radiation, maxed the fuck out. Like big-time code red. It couldn't go in. Too dangerous.

A little past 6 p.m., workers managed to hook up enough batteries from cars and trucks to get the first gauge is working. That's awesome. Their reward, though, was an unwelcome discovery. The two valves needed to be open to allow cooled water to flow in from the isolation condenser back into the reactor of Unit 1 were closed. When the power cut out, the system had misread the signal as a steep. leak and close them. Before workers could add water to Unit 1, however, they would have to vent the reactor, releasing steam to lower the pressure, otherwise the steam would explode out like an overheated pressure cooker the minute they opened it. That meant opening the closed valves,

and for that they needed power. The control room sent a message to the emergency response center, requesting more batteries so they could open the safety valves and vent the steam, but the request didn't seem that urgent. The emergency response team frantically running down scenarios on all six reactors were still going off the report that they got in earlier when workers said that they heard hissing sounds from one and saw steam was puffing from a vent on the side of the building, both of which seemed to indicate that the isolation condenser was working. Unit two, on the other hand, seemed to be the much bigger problem. And so the workers trying desperately to stabilize, Unit one waited and waited and waited all the while not knowing if their families, friends, and

neighbors had survived the tsunami. At 919, operators used battery power to read the water levels inside the reactor, and the gauge showed that the fuel rods were still covered by about 8 inches of water. It was not the 20 feet of water that would normally be above the fuel rods, but it was at least something. At least it appeared to be something. In reality, the water level indicator was malfunctioning. There was no water left to cool the nuclear fuel. It was only a matter of time before the molten nuclear fuel, called corium, would burn through the reactor vessel, fall to the bottom of the concrete containment chamber. By around 10 p.m., radiation levels in unit 1 started to rise. That meant radioactive material was escaping the reactor, and that's exactly what

was happening. The steel reactor vessel had cracked. Moulton fuel was leaking into the dry well, the space beneath the primary containment chamber. And to make matters worse, the intense heat of the reactor core triggered a chemical reaction that produced highly flammable hydrogen gas, another urgent threat on top of an already dire situation. Could workers figure out what to do before an explosion was imminent? And now let's take a break from the power plant. And and moved the following day and look elsewhere. The hundreds of thousands of people who had fled their homes a day before awoke to a very different Japan on Saturday, March 12th.

Friday morning, a bit of normal day for most people, packing school lunches, eating a quick breakfast before work, catching the bus or trained to go to work or run errands. None of that was happening now. There was no longer a school to pack lunches four or a bus to take you there. There was not a workplace to go to, or for many a kitchen to make breakfast in. Things were just gone. More than 400,000 people, right?

We're without homes. Such a crazy stat. More than 400,000 people without homes. Reminds me of Hurricane Katrina over 400,000 people displaced, left homeless because of that storm. Many in Japan were stranded on rooftops and hills surrounded by the water and wreckage left behind by the tsunami. The earthquake had caused much of the coast to sink and water remained trapped in many towns, turning them into saltwater lakes. In others, the water had already retreated, leaving behind a thick jumble of mangled cars, destroyed boats and crumbled. buildings. Some towns were still burning as the sun rose. Oil tanks and gas canaders broken open

by the forest of the water fueled the flames. In Ishi no Makki, the Okabo Elementary School, labanated a layer of thick black mud that was several feet deep. It would be days before the families of the children who had been there on Friday learned what happened to them. Man, indeed, every survivor had a different story. Some like Ryochi, Usazawa, had lost their homes but still had their families. He'd found his wife the night before at the local evacuation center. Both of them had taken on greeting duties at the center. Others had lost a child or a parent or both. Maybe still had the rest of their family. Some families were halves, two parents, three children down to one parent, one child. Many had lost entire families. Toshikazu Abe, for example, would never

see his wife or mother again. It was obvious to everyone who had survived that help would not be coming anytime soon. Cell phone service was down. Landlines were non-existent. But even if they had service, who would they call? Fire stations, police stations, municipal centers had been carried away with everything else. The roads that ran to bigger cities washed out or blocked off. Survivors had no choice but to go out on their own in search of food, shelter, and missing loved ones.

None of them knew about the disaster that was unfolding at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Hydrogen gas was building up in Unit 1, and the increasing volume of the gas combined with a steam created by radioactive decay was making the pressure in the containment vessel climb. By 11 p.m. the night before, the pressure had already exceeded the maximum that the vessel was meant to hold. That made the job of getting water inside the reactor to cool it down and prevent a full meltdown that much harder.

Soon, it seemed like their best bet was to vent steam through the torus. Taurus, or a suppression pool, sits like a giant hollow donut beneath the reactor vessel. When pressure in the reactor gets too high as safety valve opens and allows steam to escape into the tors where it condenses back into water. The good news is the steam that passes through the torus has scrubbed most of its radioactive isotopes before it leaves the building, a vast improvement over allowing the steam to enter the environment. But before operators could open the vents, which would likely still release some radioactive steam into the air, they needed approval from the government. And they needed to give residents of the nearby towns time to evacuate. In the meantime, operators also needed to find a way to open two valves without working controls. That would mean sending workers into the reactor building where the radiation levels have.

been rising. Supervisors plan to send teams in one at a time to make rescue easier in case they ran into problems, to reduce the risk of putting young, able-bodied people in the path of cancer causing molecules. They opted for older volunteers. Still, when Takayuki andaki, a maintenance manager, asked for volunteers for the dangerous job, many young workers raised their hands. The site moved him to tears. To go into a pitch-black reactor building, with the containment pressure so high, he later remembered. It felt like we were putting together a suicide squad. It would be a grueling task, so they selected workers they thought were strong enough to complete it successfully and divided them into teams of three. Then it was time to practice,

all with the aim of getting into Unit 1 around 9 a.m. overnight, other response teams were formed to clean up debris so workers could get to the reactor buildings and to set up vital systems to get power and water to them. Thankfully, at 5.44 a.m., the Prime Minister of Japan, Naoto Khan issued the evacuation order for everyone within six miles of the plant, about 45,000 people altogether. For many of the refugees, sheltering at evacuation centers, the order to evacuate was the first indication that something had gone seriously wrong with the nuclear plant,

and it left them with a terrible choice. Would they do as they were told? Or would they stay, hoping to find some trace that they're missing family members, their friends, their neighbors? One man, Norio Kimura, lived just two miles from the plant. The tsunami had swept away his home, along with his wife, father, and one of his daughters. He desperately wanted to search for his missing family,

but he also had a daughter with him, and in order to protect her from potential radiation, he would have to leave with her. That meant leaving any hope of finding his other family members behind, and many others made the same choice, figuring they owed it to the ones who had survived, including themselves, to not be in harm's way again. Throughout the early morning, residents in the towns of Futaba and Okama,

as well as nearby Namiae and Tomioka, clambered into buses abound for towns further inland. And if you got to evacuate, you were actually very lucky. At the Fultaba Hospital, over 200 patients in the hospital staff prepared to evacuate.

About 130 patients who were confined to their beds as well as 98 residents of a nursing home who could not be moved were left behind without staff to care for them. My God, that's fucking dire. Okay, everybody, we're going to take off now, but don't worry. We've left some snacks

for those of you who, who have to have to stay behind. Well, we'll come back. We will come back soon to rescue you. We will probably come back soon. We might. We might not. We probably won't.

The more I think about it. So just try and keep your spirits high, hope for the best. We're going to be handing out some cyanide tablets because, you know, this looks bad. This looks really bad for all of you. The staff had been told that Japan's special defense forces would be there soon to move the bed-ridden patients. In reality, it would take a few days for them to arrive. In the meantime, the patients were left without heat. electricity, any basic care.

Four died by the time help arrived. Fourteen more died as they were being moved to safety. 35 more patients were left behind once again. They would not be rescued for two more days. Then at 9.04 a.m., nine volunteers finally headed for the Unit 1 reactor to begin vending. Team 1, which went to the second floor, managed to open the valve there. The second team headed for the Taurus. As Team 2 entered the basement, the sound of the steam thundering into the suppression

pool was overwhelming. The Taurus room normally dry was hazy with steam. team. The team's task was to open a valve that would allow steam to escape from the suppression pool through a pipe to the outside. To do that, they would need to walk out onto the surface of the Taurus. One worker took a tentative step to do that, and his fucking shoes literally started to melt. Not so much radiation and heat was there. A team member's Dossameter indicated that he had already been exposed to the maximum amount of radiation he was allowed to receive in a full year. They had no choice but to abandon their mission. By this point,

the operators had been on shift for 30 straight hours. They were working constantly trying to develop solutions that nobody had come up with in the history of nuclear engineering, and they weren't done yet. They came up with a new plan to blow the valve open from a distance now using an air compressor. With that, they began to search for one at the jumbled mess of the nuclear plant. It was 2 p.m. before they finally found one and installed it. To the operator's immense relief, the pressure in the drywell finally began to fall at about 2.30. Look like the vent was working, letting out steam, taking the pressure off the containment structure. But was that actually happening?

No, it was not. In reality, the pressure was going down for a far more ominous reason. At the top of the containment structure was a heavy steel lid that could be open for reactor maintenance, like the lid on the top of a pot of boiling water. Unlike the lid on the top of a pot of boiling water, it normally took a crane to move the massive dome, which was held down by dozens of oversized bolts.

but the prolonged high pressure in the chamber below it had worked the bolts loose and hydrogen gas was escaping into the reactor building. But nobody knew that yet. And so at 3.30 p.m. Saturday afternoon, March 12, the 40-member electrical team finally finished connecting power to the unit one building. Now, excuse me, grateful for one small victory in what had become the worst shift at the nuclear power plant to date. With the valves working and the power restored, seemed like everything would begin to fall into place for a total cooldown and crisis would be averted. Except that wasn't what would happen.

Six minutes later, all their work would be undone. At 336, somewhere in the Unit 1 building, a spark met the cloud of hydrogen gas, escaping to the dome, and in an instant, the molecules surrounding the spark burst into flame, and just a few milliseconds more, the heat raced through all of the gas in the building, setting into light. Superheated air leaped outward in a thundering explosion, shredding the walls of the reactor building and sending a cloud of white smoke and debris billowing into the air. Workers in the middle of injecting water and restoring power still believing that they were on the road to stabilize in the units were paralyzed as the windows of a nearby fire truck blew out and a cloud of rubble rained down upon them. When the smoke cleared, the entire roof and top third of the Unit 1 building have been reduced to a smoking steel skeleton.

And invisible to the human eye, radiation was already spreading. When large amounts of radioactive isotopes are released into the air, as they were during the explosion at reactor 1, they can form a radioactivity. cloud of isotopes mixed with air, smoke, water, and other particles from the explosion. Like rain clouds, radiation clouds, are driven by the weather. A map created by the comprehensive nuclear test span treaty organization showed the likely path of the radioactive plume from the Fukushima swirling a plant swirling across the North Pacific and sweeping under the west coast of the U.S. But at the plant, workers couldn't worry about that now.

They still needed to find a way to get water into the reactor at Unit 1. unless they could cool the mass of corium, the chain reaction would continue unchecked, growing hotter and hotter until the corium ate through the concrete of the secondary containment. Desperate to replace the cooling water in the reactor, Yoshida decided it was time to try his last resort, seawater. Everyone knew the injection of seawater would damage the reactor beyond repair, since the random molecules floating in seawater would interfere with the carefully maintained reaction inside. But they had no choice. Nothing was more important than getting water around the overheating fuel run.

In order to span the distance from the seawater holding tank, three fire trucks needed to be connected by a series of hoses to form a chain. In the hours before the explosion, workers had laid out fire hoses in preparation for the seawater injection, but those hoses were damaged by the blast. Now workers scrambled to get the pumping system back online, patching hoses that could be salvaged, cobbling together new hoses to make this all fucking work. It was a mess. Around 7 p.m., they managed to start pumping seawater into the reactor. what was going on with the other reactors? Workers in the main control room for units 3 and 4 had noticed a sudden climbing radiation in their workspace after the hydrogen explosion in Unit 1 the day before, which ordinarily would call for an immediate evacuation.

But this was not ordinary circumstances, obviously. And something needed to be done about units 3 and 4. At first, after the quake, reactor 3 had scramed, as planned, but the morning after the tsunami, the Rixie had shut down, an emergency injection system, or HPCI, HIPSI, had automatically kicked in when the Rixie shut down around noon on March 12th. But now, on the early morning of March 13th, the Hipsy was failing. Operators decided they would have to try to use fire hoses to deliver water to the core, but this solution was short-lived, not long after the fire hoses began pumping,

the batteries powering Unit 3 spluttered out. Now, just as it had with Unit 1, pressure in Unit 3 started to climb. And as they had done before, workers tried to get the vents open, but it wouldn't happen soon enough. At around 9 a.m., the water and the reactor sank below the tops of the fuel rods by 1043 a.m., unit 3 was melting down. Now, two reactors were pumping radiation into the air, not to mention the hydrogen gas that was spreading to unit 3.

Unit 1's explosion had been bad enough, but an explosion at Unit 3 would be far worse. The building had reinforced concrete walls on the upper floor, making it a sturdier structure that would be able to hold more gas before the system failed. The stronger structure might buy the plant. operators more time, but it also meant that an even larger cloud of flammable gas was building. On the morning of the 14th, operators brainstorm ways to open up the Unit 3 building to let out that hydrogen steam, but they were too late. At 11.01 a.m., a hydrogen explosion bigger and more violent than the one they'd experienced two days earlier now rocked Unit 3. The blast sent a cloud of black smoke,

thick with concrete dust hundreds of feet into the air. Massive hunks of concrete rained down around the building. Eleven workers would be injured in that explosion, but incredibly all of them would survive. But that piece of good news wasn't good enough. After accounting for the crew that had been outside during the explosion, workers turned back to their instruments and discovered that the water level in Unit 2 started to go down. The disastrous meltdown cycle was about to begin yet again, and this time the workers had even less sleep, less food, less morale.

But it had to be done. To make things even worse, soon became apparent that venting Unit 2 was impossible. But if they didn't figure out some way to reduce the pressure, Unit 2's explosion would make it impossible for workers to continue pumping water into units. One and three, meaning both of those would continue to melt down, completely unchecked. They raced to figure out a solution, but one didn't come fast enough. My God, by 5 p.m., the water level and reactor 2 fell below the tops of the fuel rods. By 720, the core began to melt.

The race was over. All three of the active reactors at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down. And the shit show, not over. At 6.12 a.m., Tuesday morning, March 15th, a loud rumble shook the control room. But it wasn't Unit 2. It was Unit 4. As it turned out, Unit 2 had caught a lucky break when Unit 2 had blown. The force of that blast had knocked a square panel from Unit 2's exterior, creating a vent for hydrogen gas building up inside. A cloud of white steam had been pouring from the side of the building since then preventing the buildup that had been so disastrous in the other two buildings. Unit 4, on the other hand, was blowing the fuck up.

the top two floors of the building collapsed, sending workers who have been out on the grounds cleaning up the radioactive debris left by the first two explosions scurrying for safety. They headed for the emergency response center, clambering over roads, choked with debris and radiation suits that were not suited for moving fast. It was almost two hours before they made it to the emergency response building, at which point they informed Superintendent Yoshida that it was actually Unit 4, not 2, that are just exploded. But why had it exploded? Wasn't it shut down? Yep, but it found a way. This time it had to do with the reactor's fuel pellets.

Interestingly, the fuel pellets that drive the chain reaction in a nuclear reactor are not particularly radioactive. About 95% of each pellet is uranium 238, an isotope with a half-life of four and a half billion years. The rest is uranium 235, which has a half-life of 704 million years. That means that the atoms and the fuel are very, very slow to decay, and decaying is part of what releases radiation. That means that the pellets of uranium used at Fukushima

will be as old as Earth is now before half of the uranium 238 atoms have emitted radiation. In other words, they were saved now to be handled by bare hands. Once uranium atoms have been struck by neutrons and fissioned, however, very different story. In a reactor, many of the uranium-235 nuclei split apart, transforming into radioactive isotopes, mainly iodine 131, ccium-137. But some of the uranium 238 atoms absorb a stray neutron and become something else entirely,

plutonium 239. And so even when the fuel is spent, you still have plutonium floating around, which is highly radioactive. And if reactors are operating normally, you get a lot of plutonium. Each of the reactor buildings at Fukushima Daiichi included a massive spent fuel pool, included a massive spent fuel pool on the fifth floor. The smallest pool in Unit 1 held 261,000 gallons of water. The largest in Unit 6 held more than 385,000, a little more than half the volume of an Olympic-sized pool. When it was time to store these spent fuel rods, cranes would typically move the submerged rods through the water, never dredging them up from the pool.

If you remember from the beginning, before the tsunami, units 4, 5, and 6 have been shut down for maintenance. Units 5 and 6 still had fuel in their reactors, but they were in cold shutdown. In Unit 4, however, the fuel from the reactor had already been transferred to the storage pool. That meant the pool had more spent fuel than the others. And since it had only recently been removed from the reactor, the fuel was hotter, too. The shaking from the earthquakes had removed about three feet of water from the pool, but operators had calculated that there was still enough water submerging the spent rods to last about a week, so they focused their attention elsewhere.

But then on the morning of March 15th, the water dropped. The circoneum cladding that encased the fuel rods ignited, and the building blew up, releasing plutonium from almost 900 tons of spent fuel. To make matters worse, at about the same time as the explosion on Unit 4, operators in the Unit 2 control room heard about another explosion coming from the Taurus beneath Reactor 2. A malfunctioning gauge in the Taurus showed a sudden drop in pressure, they assumed that the Taurus had ruptured, meaning the containment vessel for the reactor had been breached.

More radiation was flowing out. Realizing it was now too dangerous to keep all but a few workers on site, over 600 workers were sent home, leaving only about six. 70 behind. But it wasn't only dangerous for the plant operators. This radiation could now travel wherever the wind took it. The question was, how much of it was up there? How far would it go? Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States ran simulations and realized that a breach in the Unit 2 Taurus combined with a meltdown in the Unit 4 fuel pool would require everyone within a 50-mile radius of the plant more than 2 million people to evacuate.

But there was a possibility still that things could get worse. Prime Minister, Neotou, on, worried that the fuel in all six of the fuel pools might melt, which would then require the evacuation of Tokyo, a city of more than 13 million with the metro population of up to 41 million. The government issued an order for people living beyond the evacuation zone of 12 miles, but within 19 miles of the plant, to remain inside with their windows and doors closed. Not ominous or concerning at all. It's totally safe for you guys to stay where you are. Just don't fucking breathe any air from outside.

You hear me? Only breathe the air already in your homes. You're golden. You're fine. But if you breathe, air from outside? Oh, shit. You don't even want to fucking know what's going to happen to you. Many feared that they might be trapped in their homes if condition worsens. Conditions worsens. So they opted to leave instead. And they had the right idea. That night, radiation fell from the clouds in a flurry of rain and snow. That's cool. Just radiation snow. Endangering the residents of towns that were not in the evacuation zone. And keep in mind, a lot of people around here don't even have houses to shelter in anymore. They were clustered in evacuation centers, schools, hospitals, wherever they could go as supplies petered out. Nobody wanted to make the dangerous journey to restock shelves in a bubble of nuclear radiation. Meanwhile, at the plant, all eyes turned to the steaming buildings of units three and four. Operators needed to get the water into the fuel pools, but the pools were five stories in the air. I hate saying fuel pools, by the way. Makes me want to say fuel, fuel, in the fuel fuel fuel, anyway, operators needed to get water into the fuel pools, but the pools were five stories in the air

and there was no way to access them from below. A plan to have special defense forces, helicopters, drop water on the reactors was axed when it became clear that radiation levels above the reactors far too high for helicopter pilots to safely do their job. Things were looking pretty fucking abysmal. On March 16th, Wednesday,

here's how things stood. Reactor 1 was melted down. It's building destroyed. Reactor 2 was melted down, but the building was still intact. Reactor 3 melted down, building also destroyed. Reactor 4 not melted down, but the building had exploded.

Both reactors 5 and 6 were shut down. Then that morning, another fire broke out at the Unit 4 reactor and attempts to reach the fuel pools by helicopter that morning were once again stymied by potentially deadly levels of radiation. The copters did manage to drop some water onto the buildings, but they were forced to fly so high that very little of that water made it to the targets. But the helicopter pilots did manage to see the reflection of the sky in the depths of the exploded building, and that meant there was still water inside it,

and the fuel was not drying, burning, which was a godsend. Also meant that operators had to go back to the drawing board to figure out the source of Unit 4's explosion. As it turned out, the combustion had nothing to do with the spent fuel pool. Quick-thinking operators managed to figure it out. The building shared a smokestack with Unit 3, and when hydrogen built up in the Unit 3 building,

it had backed up into Unit 4, sparking explosion in the air ducts on the building's fourth floor. The fires, which had been caused by oils, spilled on the floor, burned out on their own. And the Taurus and Unit 2 had not exploded either. Much later, investigators put together that faulty readings from the broken gauge, accompanied by the sound of the explosion, had led operators to the wrong conclusion, which was not their fault, by the way. They were basically trying to put together a radioactive piece of IKEA furniture without being able to get close enough to actually touch it. For literally the longest, most ass-kicking,

stressful work shift anyone has maybe fucking ever had. All of this marked a turning point. There would be no further explosions to undo the operator's hard work. Sea water was being pumped into the reactors of units one, two, and three, cooling them and reducing the risk of another explosion or meltdown. Anxious to stabilize the spent fuel pools. Operators ran four more helicopter flights on the evening of March 17th, but radiation levels above the reactors were still too high to get much water in. The helicopters had to fly too far above the reactor buildings, and the strong March winds carried most of the water they dropped about 6,000 pounds and all away from their targets. Then, on the night of March 18th, a team of elite firefighters from Tokyo arrived with fire trucks designed to put out fires and skyscrapers.

These firefighters were the A-team, seasoned professionals who were trained to navigate towering fires in the skyscrapers of Tokyo. But they were still shaken by the idea of working in a cloud of radiation for some crazy reason and with almost zero visibility. Their target was five stories over their heads and hidden from view, but they had to hit the pools dead on. And they needed to do it quickly and also be ready to save themselves with something exploded, which was very very very. possible. Well, the firefighters did their jobs as quickly as they could and made a hasty retreat. They fucking crushed it. By the following morning, the 18th, the radiation levels of the plant had dropped enough to allow nuclear operators back in, finally relieving the 70 staff who'd been working in a damn cancer blizzard for a week straight. Three days later,

on March 21st, 10 days after the quake and tsunami, power was restored to all six reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. By that time, They were pumping thousands of tons of seawater a day into reactors one, two, and three, where it flowed around the melted cores and pulled into a radioactive mess in the building's basements. Hail Nimrod. Could have been so, as bad as it was, could have been so much worse. A bunch of heroes refused to give up on those reactors. It would be almost nine months before all three reactors reached cold shutdown.

Thanks to power being restored in the area, people who have been unable to get news coverage, now heard that three reactors had melted down, spreading a toxic cloud across the country, and it was spreading. radioactive iodine had already been found in cows milk from farms in Fukushima Prefecture, as well as radioactive iodine and cesium on spinach harvested at farms up to 90 miles away from the plant. It was possible that going outside was deadly. But not going outside meant not being able to get necessary supplies, food, water, and gasoline. And it meant not being able to look for relatives, friends, and neighbors who still hadn't reappeared after the tsunami.

What were people supposed to do? On March 24th, Katsunobu Sakari, the mayor of a town near the city, plant named Minna Misoba recorded an impassioned plea for help and posted it on YouTube. Minamisoma was in the 12 to 19 mile zone around the plant and had been told to stay indoors to avoid radiation. Full nine days after the order was issued, they were still trapped in their homes and evacuation centers and were running out of food. Now look like the 20,000-ish people who had not managed to evacuate were going to literally starve to death. My God, you survived the fucking biggest earthquake in the history of Japan, then survived the biggest tsunami

in the history of Japan, then a nuclear plant melts down, then it snows on you, but you're still alive, except now you're running out of food. The 11-minute recording posted on YouTube went viral instantly. Calls of support poured in from all over the world, including the U.S., hundreds of boxes of food and relief supplies quickly followed. Some people were more lucky. They actually managed to get out. Closer to the plant, the town of Futaba was eerily silent, its buildings frozen as they'd been the moments before the earthquake. Book bags still hung on hooks in classrooms. dishes and pictures littered the floor of houses. Signposts were pitched at ominous angles across streets.

All 1,415 of the town's residents can be found more than 150 miles away in a suburb of Tokyo. There they had set up a town in exile, essentially, at Saitama Kisai High School. Residents now lived in classrooms or in the school gym. Relief agencies serve meals in the cafeteria. These schools' administrative offices functioning as a makeshift town hall. They wouldn't be allowed to return to their homes until May 11th. 11th. And even then, only to salvage important documents like birth certificates that they could find them. By that time, the accident had been rated a 7 on the INES scale, the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, a score shared with only the Chernobyl disaster. And there's no eight on that scale, by the way. Seven is the worst. But in practical terms, the worst could have been actually a whole lot worse. The impacts of the Fukushima meltdowns were far less severe than Chernobyl's. I feel like that scale needs updating. At Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor actually exploded, spewing material from the reactor core straight into the atmosphere.

At Fukushima, while radiation did escape from the reactor vessels and there was explosions, the protective shelves around the reactors had remained intact and prevented far worse explosions. In the end, about 10 times more radiation escaped from Chernobyl than from Fukushima. Luckily, there have not been any cases of cancer linked to exposure among the workers who fought to prevent the meltdowns in the days following the tsunami. Fukushima plant, superintendent, Maasau, Yoshima, Shea did die in 2013 as a result of esophageal cancer, but because it was diagnosed quite soon after the accident and because cancers take years or even decades to develop, it was not believed to have been caused by the meltdowns.

But a lawsuit brought by more than 400 sailors who were aboard the nearby USS Ronald Reagan during the disaster alleged they had developed cancer and other ailments as a result of their exposure. However, the WHO, the World Health Organization, concluded that although there might be a very small increasing cancer risk for babies and children in the worst affected areas there would likely be no effect on residents elsewhere in Japan. Backing that up, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the effects of atomic radiation found that the amount of radiation exposure as a result of the accident was too low to cause cancers in anyone outside the plant. A much, much, much worse

nuclear disaster had been avoided thanks to the bravery of those workers. Still, the government decided not to take any more chances on nuclear reactors. By a year later, May of 2012, all 50 working nuclear reactors in Japan had ground to a halt. And Japan not alone in reconsidering nuclear power. A year earlier, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had announced that eight German nuclear power plants would close. She promised to close nine more by 2022, making Germany a country without nuclear power. Other countries followed suit. And now on to the after effects of the earthquake and tsunami that were not nuclear-related.

23 months after the tsunami, the Ishi Nomaki city government announced the establishment of the Okawa Elementary School Incident Verification Committee, which would spend a year reviewing documents and conducting interviews. Its findings were published in a 200-page report in February of 2014. It concluded that the deaths arose because the evacuation of the playground was delayed, while staff decided what to do, and because the children and teachers eventually fled towards the tsunami, not away from it. But it wasn't only their fault. The report said that the school, the Board of Education, and the city government were inadequately prepared for that kind of natural disaster.

Indeed, the municipal hazard map, which indicated areas of coast vulnerable to a tsunami, did not include Kamiya. Therefore, the possibility of a tsunami was not included in the school's disaster manual, and nobody in the municipal government had checked to make sure that the school had a tsunami protocol. Teachers at the school, the report stated, were psychologically unable to accept that they were facing imminent danger. If any one of these failures had not occurred,

the committee concluded the tragedy could have been avoided. Just a few weeks later, and a day before the third anniversary of the tsunami, on March 10, 2014, the families of 23 children who had died at Okawa filed a lawsuit against the city of Ishiomaki and Miyagi Prefecture, accusing them of negligence.

The case would drag on for years, with a verdict delivered on October 26, 2016. The parents would win their case, be rewarded more than, or awarded more than $17 million U.S. dollars, or that equivalent, something, obviously, but certainly did not bring back their kids. Backing up a little now in 2015, the evacuation order was lifted for the town of Naraja, about nine miles from the plant. Two years later, residents were allowed to return to the towns of Namia and Itate, but residents had been,

have been slow to return. By 2018, only about 2,200 people had returned to Naraja, a town that had once had almost 8,000 residents. Two years after the evacuation, order was lifted in Nammei, about a thousand people out of a former population of 21,000 had come back to their homes. Oh my God. Of those who did move back, the majority were elderly and retired, and they just couldn't imagine living anywhere else. In July of 2017, more than six years after the disaster at Fukushima, a tiny robot swam to the Unit 3 building. At less than eight inches long with a cheerful red cylindrical body, a saucer-shaped head, and four whirring propellers, the mini-mobo was decidedly cute, seemingly more appropriate for a toy store than

the site of a nuclear disaster. But the little robot was tougher than it seemed, and it was here to do a task nobody had been able to accomplish. Cleanup workers have been trying to get a look inside reactors one, two, and three for years, but could not navigate around the waterlog, radioactive debris. And it wasn't only human workers. Five robots that had tried to reach the reactor core have been destroyed by radiation before they got there. That's fucking wild. Just destroyed. Instead, work at the plant was primarily focused on the larger complex. About 7,000 workers reported to the complex every day, planning and carrying out the monumental task of cleaning up a radioactive disaster zone.

Fortunately, plant workers and visitors no longer needed to wear full radiation suits when they enter the grounds. All of the soil on the site full of radioactive dust have been paved over to prevent it from becoming airborne. In order to accomplish that, all of the trees and other plants on the grounds have been cut down. Before the disaster, part of the complex had been a bird sanctuary, with over two, 200 acres of forest, but that had to be raised in the cleatum, where grassy banks once lined roadways, an unforgiving expanse of pale gray concrete now stretched as far as the eye could see. Pretty dystopian. The trees and other plants estimated to total almost 3 million cubic feet of radioactive litter lay in massive brush piles on the plant grounds held in place by

heavy sheets of white plastic. But the plant had to be disassembled once and for all, and they couldn't do that until they knew what was going on inside the half-demolished buildings. After many tries, operators had finally managed to find the fuel in units one and two, one and two, but unit three, which was covered by more water than the other two, had proved to be more difficult. The mini-mobo, which had special cladding to shield it from radiation and sensors that would allow it to avoid dangerous radiation hotspots was the right robot for the job. And for three days, Mombos' bright headlight cut through the pitch-black water of the flooded reactor building, recording a scene of jumbled metal and concrete,

flex of debris floated in the soupy water, making it difficult to pick out shapes. Four operators steered Mombo to the Unit 3 reactor vessel where they found what they were looking for. At the bottom there was a giant hole where the melting fuel had eaten through steel. Beneath that was a lumpy mass of cooled corium. Although experts had long believed that the fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 had melted to the reactor vessels, it wasn't until this moment that they had proof. Armed with this knowledge, TEPCO would begin to make plans to disassemble the reactors for good now. Part of that was figuring out how to catch any radioactive debris that might be knocked loose as workers dismantled the broken reactors and moved fuel from their storage pools to a safer location.

By 2020, workers were busy constructing a strong shell around Unit 1, while Unit 3 was covered up by a giant barrel-shaped cap. Unit 4 was hidden beneath a sleek, gray, and white frame built to unload fuel from its storage pools. Even with that done, there would still be a huge issue. Where would all of the water used to cool the reactors go? The amount of water being stored at Fukushima Daiichi would balloon to more than 320 million gallons by 2020. More than three-quarter of that stored water still carried more radioactive isotopes than the Japanese government considered safe. All told, the Japanese government estimates that it will take more than 40 years to fully dismantle the reactors and the materials they have contaminated at Fukushima. Even so, the area immediately around the plant may not be safe to inhabit for decades.

The iodine 131 that spread across the area during the accident has a half-life at eight days, meaning that it's largely decayed and the safer elements now, but CCM-137 with a 30-year half-life, and strontium-90 with a 28-year half-life, will literally take, or, yeah, likely take hundreds of years to completely decay. Much of the area's soil has been hauled away by the Japanese government, but again, where do you put it? For now, over 700 dump sites scattered around Fukushima,

prefecture, are filled with mounds of black plastic from a distance to look like regular garbage bags. In fact, the gigantic heavy-duty bags each able to hold about a ton of trash are packed full of radioactive debris, but there's no permanent place for that debris yet, and that's a problem. For example, when a typhoon caused major flooding in the area in October of 2019, hundreds of those bags swept into a river. Whoops!

In the wake of all this, many investigators, scientific, governmental, and international have also had a bigger puzzle on their hands. Why did this happen? As we said up top, Japan is rocked by hundreds of earthquakes every year, all of them with the potential to bring a tsunami, you know, in the right or perhaps wrong conditions. So why did the plant fail? Over years of investigations, it became clear that TEPCO had not built his plant for a tsunami of that size. Instead, it had built a plant to meet the minimum standards required by law, which does make sense, right? There had never been a tsunami that fucking big before.

Why would you even think that was possible? When it built a plant in the 1960s, the company had actually lowered the hillside by more than 100 feet. digging out soil to bring the reactors closer to water. Had the plant been built on the hillside at its original height, the reactors would have been out of reach of that tsunami. But, you know, hindsight's 20-20. There were also things that went right at the plant. Although the fuel in the storage pools and the reactor buildings had become dangerously hot during the long ordeal, another on-site storage system had succeeded. Before the tsunami, over 400 spent fuel assemblies had been packed into cement casks on the plant grounds in what is known as dry cask storage. Although

they were rolled by the waves, the castes remained intact, and the fuel inside was untouched. All of this made it clear that dry storage was massively safer than wet storage. In other words, scientific advancement at the cost of near total disaster. But for many regular people in Japan, not nuclear plant operators, this is a paltry return for a costly loss. And Japanese sentiment has decidedly turned against nuclear power. On the surface, this may seem to make sense, especially when you consider the costs, both financial and environmental of contamination.

In Itate, the town with the highest levels of contamination, the cleanup cost came to about $1.8 million per household. That did not include surrounding forests, which are basically impossible to clean. In addition, the necessity of evacuating residents during the meltdown prevented rescue efforts after the earthquake and tsunami in nearby towns, leading some to blame nuclear power for the hundreds of deaths

as sick and elderly people were either uprooted or left to fend for themselves. But despite the real and devastating effects of the meltdown, other forms of power may pose a greater threat to Japan. Since 2011, the country has focused on using other fuels to generate electricity, including coal and natural gas. By 2015, nuclear power provided just 1.5% of energy in the country, down from around 30% before the quake.

About 90 coal-burning plants accounted for 32.3% of the country's power, and the country had committed to adding 30 more. And if you're thinking, well, at least there's not any radioactive material being produced there, you're wrong. A properly functioning coal-burning plant spreads radioactive lead, uranium, radon, polonium, and thorium every single day. These naturally occurring radioactive isotopes become concentrated in fly ash, some of which escaped the chimneys of coal-burning plants. Even worse, burning coal produces air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that are real threats to human health. In a study commissioned by the Environmental Group Greenpeace in 2016, plans for new coal-burning plants on the outskirts of two major Japanese.

cities, Tokyo and Osaka, were estimated to have the potential to cause as many as 26,000 premature deaths over a 40-year period. Did the Japanese government overreact and over-correct following the Fukushima nuclear accident? A lot of people think so. I think so. Now let's return to the tsunami. Of those affected by the earthquake and tsunami, more than 47,000 people still displaced from their homes nine years later in 2020. Even for those who managed to return and rebuild, life very different from the way it was before the disaster. And all close to 20,000 people, 19,759, died in the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that followed. Actually, more like over 22,000 because 2,553 additional people are still listed as missing,

and if you've been missing for that long following that kind of disaster, you are dead. Family members and neighbors were gone. Many simply disappeared. Their bodies never recovered. Many of the survivors are still dealing with the trauma of literally watching their loved ones or homes get carried away by the water, as they have for centuries the residents of Tohoku have worked to memorialize those they lost. And those memorials are called tsunami stones. And this is a cultural tradition, very cool, goes back hundreds of years. A stone in the tiny village of Ineoshi

in Iwate Prefecture sits at the high watermark from a 1933 tsunami and warns, do not build your homes below this point. In the village of Murahama, a shrine at the top of the town's largest hill carries a dire warning when a tsunami swept through the area in the year 869, many of the village's residents had rushed to high ground there, but it wasn't high enough. A second tide swept the villagers away, drowning them. Marking the place where the villagers were killed, the shrine alerted future generations that the hill was not as safe as it looked. More than a thousand years later, villagers from Urahama knew to avoid the hilltop with the shrine and evacuated to a spot further inland. That's awesome. This tradition was carried

on was carried on in Natori, where a sculpture now marks the top of the hill, where 200 people hoping to escape the tsunami were killed. Shaped like a seedling to represent the town's determination to move forward, the sculpture is as tall as the wave that swept the town's people away, serving as both a memorial and a warning to future residents. And the Okawa Elementary School, where so many students and teachers drowned, serves as its own kind of memorial. Students now attend class in a new building, but the original school still stands as a reminder of these 74 students and 10 teachers who died there. But one tribute seems to capture the pain of the tsunami victims and survivors more than any other.

On a hillside behind Osushi, a telephone booth sits amid the long grass and flowers and a sunny garden overlooking the town. It's a cheerful white structure with the peaked roof, glass panels, and a sign that reads Telephone of the Wind. Inside is an old-fashioned rotary phone that has played an important role in helping people move on from the disaster. its owner, Itaru Sasaki, is a retired fisherman who moved to that spot years ago because of its sweeping views of the sea. On March 11, 2011, he watched from his safe garden on the cliffs as the sea swallowed Ososhi.

In the days following the tsunami, he added the sign to the phone booth that sat in his garden. Survivors, desperate to say goodbye to those who have been lost, began to visit. They stepped inside the glass booth, picked up the receiver of the disconnected old phone, and began to talk to their missing loved ones. if you tell yourself there's no sound Suzuki says there won't be any sound but if you listen very closely you may be able to hear something

in the six years following the tsunami roughly 25,000 people visit Suzuki's phone to leave messages for the dead that is fucking powerful and he's not the only one who's had to deal with the ghost of the tsunami and now this next section

little section might seem more apt for scare to death but I think it does a good job bringing the human emotional side of the 2000 11 Japan disasters into focus. Reverend Kaneda was chief priests at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. During the earthquake on March 11th, the great wooden beams the temple's halls had flexed and groaned as the ground shook. Over the next days, he endured without power, water, or connection to the outside world,

not knowing a tsunami had followed the earthquake. Reverend Kaneda had no idea what was going on, and then people started to arrive with corpses to bury. Over a month, Canada performed funeral services for 200. people, well, two hundred bodies. But what frightened him more than the instantaneous mass death was those who had survived. They did not cry, most displayed no emotion at all. Some of them didn't even seem to know where they were. Amid this numbness and horror, Canada received a visit from a man he knew, a local builder named in sources as Takeshi Ono, although that is a pseudonym.

Ono was a strong, stocky man in his late 30s, the kind of man most comfortable in blue overalls, did not look like a man with the ghost story, but that was exactly what he had. Though he had, managed to survive the earthquake and tsunami with minimal damage to his home. Ten days after the disaster, Ono, his wife, and his widowed mother all drove over to the mountains to see the extent of the damage themselves. They left in the morning and good spirits, stopped on the way to go shopping, reached the coast in time for lunch. For most of the journey, the scene was familiar, brown rice fields, villages of wood and tile, bridges over wide, slow rivers. Once they had climbed into the hills, they passed more and more emergency vehicles.

And as the road descended towards the coast, their good mood disappeared. Suddenly, before they understood where they were, they'd entered the tsunami zone. From their position on the road, they saw it's total devastation. Oh no, his wife and his mother sat down for dinner as usual that evening. He remembered that he drank two small cans of beer with a meal. Afterwards, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone, asking them how they were, what they were up to. In his words, he was starting to feel very lonely.

By the next morning, his wife told him a very different story about how the night had passed. He had started out the night making phone call, she said. said, but then things got real weird. She said he jumped up and down on all fours, began to move about the furniture, squirming around like a dog, and then he started talking, you must die, he said, you must die, everyone must die, everything must die, and be lost. In front of the house was an unsewn field, and Ono ran out into it, rolled over and over in the mud, as if he was being tumbled around by a wave, shouting, they're over there, they're all over there, look. Then he had stood up, walked out into a field, calling, I'm coming to you, I'm coming over to that side, before his

why physically wrestled him back into the house. The rising and bellowing went on all night until around five in the morning. Ono cried out, there's something on top of me, and then collapsed and fell asleep. Even though Ono claimed he had no memory of any of this shit, same thing would happen the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Then he started to remember seeing things. As darkness fell, he saw figures walking past the house, parents and kids, a group of young friends, a grandfather and child covered in mud. The day after, Ono was lethargic and inert. At night he would lie down, sleep heavily for only like ten minutes, wake up as lively and refreshed as if eight hours had passed. He staggered when he walked, glared at his wife and mother, even waved

a knife, dropped dead, he'd snarl at them, everyone else is dead, so die. Finally, he went to Reverend Canada at the temple, who figured immediately that something strange was going on. He believed it had something to do with how Ono had visited the disaster zone, pretending it was all some fun adventure. He took Ono further into the temple, sat him down, began beating the temple drum as he recounted the Heart Sutra. There are no eyes. no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, mind, no color, sound, or smell. No taste, no touch, no thing, no realm of sight, no realm of thoughts, no ignorance, no ignorance, no old age, and no death. No end to age and death, no suffering, nor any cause of suffering, nor end to suffering, no path, no wisdom, and no fulfillment.

The priest splashed him with holy water, and suddenly O'No returned to his senses and was fine after that. Ono thanked the priest and drove home. His nose was streaming like he had a cold. What came out was not mucus. It was some fucking weird pink jelly. But then he was good. For Reverend Kaneda, his spiritual work was just beginning, he said. He began traveling around the coast with a group of fellow priests,

organizing an event called Cafe de Monku, some bilingual pun, as well as being the Japanese pronunciation of the English word monk. Monkou means complaint. Soon people started coming to the temples, community centers where Café de Monkou was held. Many lived in temporary residences. the grim prefabricated huts, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, where those who could not afford something better ended up.

The priest listened sympathetically, made a point of not asking too many questions, just getting info, but they made sure to make a note of anything supernatural that came up, and apparently a lot did. Huddled survivors described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbors, dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices, out in public places, on the beaches and in ruined towns. One young man complained of pressure on his chastard.

at night, like as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who kept squatting near her house. And a middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain now because he claimed the eyes of the dead stared at him from the puddles. And it wasn't just individuals having these experiences. The fire station and Tagajo kept getting calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died there,

and then the ghosty calls would stop. the fuck at a refugee community in Onagawa An old neighbor allegedly appeared in the living rooms of temporary houses Leaving the seats wet with seawater Priests Christian and Shinto as well as Buddhists found themselves called on repeatedly to quell unhappy spirits A Buddhist monk wrote an article in an academic journal about the ghost problem And professors at Tohoku University began to catalog these stories So why was this happening

Japanese people are not known to be religious 60 to 70% of them identify as non-religious, do not practice a specific faith, but they do have a specific cultural practice that may be at the heart of these supernatural events. That cultural practice is called ancestor worship. Ancestor worship may not look like much to the untrained eye. Think special tables where photographs of deceased loved ones are placed, much like an entryway table in some Western home. But these tables are important sites for exchange. Food, drink, and prayers are offered to the ancestors who are believed to provide good fortune to the living. Might not happen all the time but for special occasions, like when somebody passes an important exam or gets

a promotion or gets married, it is expected the ancestors will get their due. When the tsunami came, it upset every facet of this important cultural practice. Household altars, memorial tablets, family photographs, all carried away. Cemetery vaults ripped open, scattering the bones of the dead. Temples are destroyed, along with memorial books, listing the names of ancestors over generations. And all that risked the ancestors, according to tradition, becoming gaki or hungry ghosts. spirits wandering between worlds according to this again belief system. Families could perform rituals to placate them,

but nobody had the time, energy, or means to do so. And then there were ancestors whose descendants have been entirely wiped out by the waves. Whole generation stuck forever in the spirit world with nobody to carry on the important exchange of prayer and offerings for good fortune. What was to be done about this? Well, one monk had an idea.

He revived a literary form which had flourished in the feudal area in Japan, the Khadan or Weird Tale, Kydanke, or weird tale parties, have been a popular summer pastime when the delicious chill and parted by ghost stories served as a form of pre-industrial air conditioning. These new Kydankai were held in modern community centers and public halls, beginning with a reading from a popular author before members of the audience would be invited to share their own experiences. Many of these were later compiled into an anthology.

The hope is, while it gives peace to survivors putting the names of the dead down, no matter who does it, might help them move on. And allegedly, it seems to have worked. Whether the origin of these ghosts was psychological or truly supernatural, well, I guess that is up for you to decide for yourself. And now, let's get out of this timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. The 2011 earthquake tsunami nuclear meltdown. What an insane story. It's hard to grasp the scale of any one of these disasters, right? The earthquake, the tsunami, nuclear meltdown, let alone all three happening just boom, boom, boom. The logistics of survival, the staggering losses, the urgent need for relief, it's almost beyond comprehension. I mean, imagine trying to

choose in one instant between your instinct to follow rules and emergency procedures with the raw animal urgency that screams at you to run for your fucking life. Imagine experiencing a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, then having to flee a towering tsunami, then wondering if it's even safe to step outside to search for food, shelter, or miss. missing relatives. How do you balance your own survival against the lives of others? How do you decide when to help and when to follow, Tendenko, putting your own oxygen mask on first so you can event, so you excuse me, even have a chance to help somebody else? Many of us hopefully will never experience a situation where we have to answer these questions. But those are the questions

that many had to navigate, answering them either by choice or by instinct alone in the Fukushima Prefecture on March 11, 2011. Magnitude 9.1 earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan struck off the northeast coast, triggering massive tremors that shook the country. Just minutes later, a towering tsunami raced inland, a devastating wave train reaching heights of up to 40 feet in some areas. Then to make things even worse, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered critical damage as the tsunami disabled its cooling systems, leading to partial meltdowns and multiple reactors.

Radiation leaked into the surrounding environment, forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate and creating a long-term crisis for the region. Over the years, the prefecture has built back, higher seawalls, environmental cleanup, and building shells around the reactor so they can be disassembled. Luckily, on the radiation front, it's estimated that there have not been a lot of consequences, health-wise, but physical recovery, only one part of the puzzle. How do you come back from such disasters, not just an infrastructure or economic terms, but like mentally, psychologically, emotionally? How do you continue living, knowing that in a single moment, everything you cherish could be swept away by forces, beyond your control. Many Japanese people have found comfort and unexpected places, the phone booth by the seashore, where they can talk to vanished family members, tsunami stones,

other monuments that commemorate the flood and war in future generations, and by telling ghost stories that keep the memories of loved ones gratified in whatever realm they now occupy. There's no grand takeaway here, no assignment of ultimate blame. Investigations later found that the Okaba school, for example, had gaps in its tsunami protocols, and that TEPCO hadn't fully planned for a tsunami of the power plan, but no one could have predicted waves as big as the ones that crashed down in Fukushima. For the most part, warning systems and procedures worked as designed, but they just weren't enough. And so, the ultimate lesson is simple. Disasters might be inevitable, but so is human resilience. And with that, let's head to some takeaways.

Time shock, top five takeaways. Number one, the great, uh, Tenova, uh, Teno, Ku earthquake, which struck on March 11, 2011 at 2.46 p.m., shook Japan's northern coast. Measuring a magnitude 9.1, it was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and one of the strongest in world history. The quake lasted about six minutes, violently shaking buildings, buckling roads, and shifting the earth's crust. Japan actually moved several feet eastward, and the earth's rotation sped up. Number two, while the earthquake turned one steady buildings into wobbling towers and parking lots and roads, into heaving pools of practically liquid concrete and asphalt, the real damage was done by the

tsunami. Tiggered by the undersea quake, massive nightmare waves slammed into coastal towns minutes later. Entire communities were swept away. Ships tossed inland. More than 18,000 people killed or went missing, mostly due to drowning. Number three, the tsunami caused a catastrophic failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant in Fukushima Prefecture. Flood waters knocked out backup generators needed to cool the reactors, leading to three nuclear meltdowns. In addition, hydrogen explosions rippled through reactor buildings, releasing radioactive material into the air and sea. Tens of thousands of residents were evacuated,

many of whom were unable to return home for years. Number four, the disaster had long-lasting global and national impacts. Japan re-evaluated its nuclear energy policies, strengthened tsunami defenses, and improved emergency preparedness systems. But beyond infrastructure and policy, the disaster left deep social and emotional scars. family suddenly gone, nearly an entire elementary school completely swallowed, and according to many, the return of ghostly spirits.

Number five, new info. Did you know that some of the people on the forefront of the recovery effort were gangsters? Organized crime members. On March 12, 2011, 25 trucks bearing 50 tons of supplies. It arrived in front of the city hall in the Hita Chinaka in the East Coast, a baraki prefecture. A hundred serious-looking men in long-sleeves shirts and coats immediately began in loading the boxes. They had made an effort to disguise themselves. Their sleeves are rolled down to hide their ornate tattoos and those who were missing fingers all wore gloves.

Yep, they were yakuza. The hardest gangsters in all of Japan. All of them, members of Japan's third largest organized criminal organization, the Inagawa Kai. They'd all decided to come in the middle of the night so it was not to cause unnecessary chaos. After all, it's not every day that 100 gang members arrive in your town. things were already chaotic as it was. The gangsters unloaded box after box of blankets, water, instant ramen noodles, bean sprouts, flashlights, batteries, disposable diapers, toilet paper, and more.

When they were done, they nodded to the city officials who had gathered there to watch, and then without another word, they just left. How surreal. Other mobster groups were doing the same thing across the country, opening their offices to anyone who needed it, sometimes even non-Japanese residents. One group, the Sumiyoshi Kai, collected over a million dollars from senior members and used it to distribute goods to Miyagi Ibaraki and the Fukushima Prefecture via front companies and associated members.

And this is not even that unusual. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, the Yamaguchi Gumi, the largest of the Yakuza groups, gathered supplies from all around the country and brought them back dispensing hot food from their offices and patrolling the streets to keep down looting. The mobsters were lauded for being faster and more efficient than government relief efforts. And not terribly surprised. I mean, there are definitely some gangsters out there. I would trust more than certain politicians.

And there are noble politicians, truly, and thank God, world needs them, and they don't get enough credit for a largely thankless job. But there are also so many shitty politicians who are just gangsters who get to remake the laws they break. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Drown by the horizon, Japan's 2011 tsunami nightmare has been sucked. Hopefully, any mispronunciation, mispronunciations. I did were not too distracting. I definitely gave it my best on that one. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping making time suck.

Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode, designing merch for the store at bad magic productions.com where you can also get summer camp tickets. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her research. Thanks to the all-seen eyes moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page, the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth and everybody over on the Time Sucks Sub-Rit and Bad Magic subred it. And now let's head on over to this week's time sucker updates.

Get your time sucker updates. First up, a message, a question that Nimrod's finest, Kayla, sent into Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com with no subject line. Kayla wrote, hello, Suckmaster. After listening to episode 503, I have a question for you. Whenever I listen to these cult episodes, I always am blown away by how easy it seems to start a cult. Then, of course, I get the thought,

I could definitely start my own cult. Then I actually have to tell myself that I'm too kind to actually be one of those wack-doodles. Do you ever think that too? Do the rest of the time suckers, or am I just insane? Since you are definitely not a cult leader, I thought I would get your perspective. Hope you and the whole bad magic team are. Well, keep on sucking. Nimrod's loyal follower, Kayla.

Kayla, I don't know, you might be insane. But if you are, so am I in the same way. Yes, I have thought about this so many times. After studying these grifters for so long, and I studied dozens and dozens of other over on The Secret Suck that never made it over to time suck. And you just, you see this pattern and you're like, I think I could actually replicate this pattern. You just have to really study one or more religions to start with, right?

Get very, very intimately familiar with the foundation of Christianity or a theosophy or a combination of a few. So you can quote and reference things. You become a member of like a fringe group within that belief system, like an outlier church or an outlier group of believers at some fucking, I don't know, crystal convention. and then you just start claiming, you know, with the utmost conviction that a higher power is using you as a channel or as a prophet, and you just never back down from that position. Whether you're infiltrating some church or writing New Age books, you just take a very extreme,

opinionated, confident position that you have, you know, secret knowledge and you do not back down. And also, so important in the beginning especially, you make a few people around who are open to believing you feel extremely special. So important to make them think that God has also done. chose them or some ancient, you know, fucking master of knowledge because, you know, and why did the person choose them? Because they're amazing, right? Act like you see how amazing they are more than anyone else ever has.

Then part of God's plan for these people is to reach out to still more people. You got to tell them that, right? Preach the good word. And the good word is growing, right? You got to build out your theology so your followers can continue to get more inside info from you and no one else and keep feeling more and more special and on the inside track. Also important, got to beat the drive. of an enemy, of a mythic, or a devil-like figure that is trying to sow doubt into their minds.

That's why they sometimes have questions. That's why they sometimes don't believe you. It's the fucking evil devil figure that's trying to trick them and pull them away from their true destiny. And you use that perceived threat to get them to cut ties with their old lives, right? There really is a blueprint for all this. I would have to change my entire personality to do it, though. I have to lose my conscience, not care that I'm just fucking destroying people's lives, not cared that the more they get into bed with me and my crazy shit, and the further away from

their former lives, the more fuck they're going to be when it's all over, right, is so gross. These cults are so gross. That's why I'm so harsh in my assessment of these cult leaders. They're just pieces of shit, all of them. Preacher or politician, anyone who essentially wants you to bend the knee and worship them is a narcissistic piece of shit. And the only news I want to hear about them is that they have died of painful death. Cut the cancer out.

So you're not alone. You might not have as many violent thoughts as I just, you know. Kayla, but you're not alone in thinking about cult leaders. Next one. A message from a marvelous meat sack identifying themselves as Professor Fluffy. I sent in the following message with the subject line of, I lived across the street. Good morning, Master Sucker. The instant you posted your Romptha Suck, I knew I had to finally ride in.

I grew up across the street from the compound. Growing up and yelled my whole life, I have witnessed what this cult has done to this town. From influencing politics in town to being against putting up cell towers and in a high accident area. Growing up across the street from the compound was wild. Every time there was a session, the whole road would be undrivable, causing accidents constantly.

Someone I dated in high school's parents, followed Jay-Z, moved here from Germany. But one day their dad scooped them up from a session, never went back. My ex feels like he saw something awful or something, yeah, saw something awful, or had something awful happen to them and their sibling. I worked with one lady who said she was a former follower.

She wasn't, she was going to the events. she claimed she had seen people two miles underground in Australia, and Australia was a staging ground for everything. There's so much more I can talk about when it comes to romsters, but I have rambled on enough, your loyal listener, Professor Fluffy. Fluffy. Is it romsters or rampsters? I don't know. Either one's good. I'm not surprised. It's somebody who, you know, believes in Jayze's bullshit, but also believe that they have been two miles beneath the Earth's surface in Australia and seeing fucking other kind of entities living down there who are going to take over the world or something. something. While studies have shown that most cult members are in fact not mentally ill, at least not when they first joined the cult, there are definitely plenty of people who do struggle with understanding what is real, what is not to a degree that would probably qualify as some type

of mental illness. And if you're somebody who thinks you have seen people living two miles beneath the earth who are not minors working in one of the world's deepest minds, of course you're not going to have as many problems as some of the rest of us believing in lizard people or, you know, or an ancient Indian guru taking over the body of a middle-aged white woman. because your ability to think critically essentially does not fucking exist. What a strange place you got to grow up in. I'm sure you have stories for days. Thanks for a little preview.

And now one more. A happy sucker, Damien. Wanting to show some love, sending a message with the subject line of love this community. Hey, suckmaster Supreme, just wanted to take a moment to thank you for everything you do, tell you about my Discord experience. I recently joined the TimeSuck Discord,

and it took all of a couple hours before someone was asking me to show them my butthole, for quote additional verification. LMAO, I expected nothing less. I also wanted to mention that recently I moved to the Canton, Ohio area, and drive on Whipple Avenue every day, and I can only hear Whipple in your voice. Anyways, thanks for getting so much,

or thanks for getting me through this hard time right now as I'm going through a divorce. I love this community, and I'm sorry, not sorry for the length of this email. Three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing. Thank you, Damien. Damien, thank you for writing in. So sorry if you're going through a divorce. Yeah, they're fucking brutal.

So glad you hopped over and met some folks on Discord to help you out, though. I hear nothing but good things about those fine ass sacks over there. And for anyone else listening, there is a link to the Discord in the episode description. Yeah, man, when people are going through it, this community always seems to just be so supportive, ready to listen, ready to advise, to console, to provide fellowship and community. Just a beautiful thing. So hail to the Mod Squad over on Discord, long may they live. and hail to all of you for helping each other out. I'm suckers. I needed that.

We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review TimeSuck if you haven't already. Hope you don't get struck by a massive earthquake this week, then a tsunami, and then fires in a nuclear disaster. But if that does happen, maybe don't listen to this episode. Pick another topic to keep on sucking. All right, let's end on a bit of good news.

Story of the man, June Suzuki, who saved not only himself, but also his mom and grandma from certain death when this tsunami hit. This is where June Suzuki lives today. He, along with 105 survivors of the March 11th, Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, called the dojo at Chizagawa High School home. The town of 17,000 residents was devastated by a 40-foot wall of wall. destroying 95% of the buildings, leaving thousands missing or dead, and most homeless. As June stood in the parking lot of a tsunami evacuation area, he, along with his mother and grandmother,

saw a wall of water devour a large market, and at that point he feared for his safety and sought shelter at adjacent retirement home. He says, when I came here, the water was up to my knee. Oh. The water stopped rising, but I felt anxious about the situation. situation. He's in this like stripped out building. So I lifted my mother up on the bed. Right. My grandmother was on a wheelchair. I also lifted her up onto the bed. We were talking that we hope the water will not come into our room anymore. Outside of the window, cars were floating on the water. Then suddenly the car overturned, the window broke and the water came

into our room. When the water rushed in, a bed or something caught my leg and I couldn't get my face above water. I was moving then, my foot got free. I was able to get above water and I grabbed this curtain rail, like up right beneath the ceiling. The water was already here, so I thought maybe the ceiling would tear. Water almost completely filled with the room. But it was strong. Holding onto the curtain rail, June survived.

Amazingly, the mattress, his mother and grandmother sat on, floated with the rising water, saving them boat. this is all that remains of June's home. My God, just nothing. I asked if he was able to salvage any of his possessions. He replied, no, nothing. A neighbor found a trinket with my name on it, but nothing else. So, I mean, sad, obviously, that he lost all of his stuff, but just amazing that he escaped with his life and was able to save his mom and grandma.

And, you know, it is amazing that whenever these horrible, horrible tragedies happen, There also is, you know, little moments if you look for them of just human beauty and heroism. So just a nice thing to remember with these dark topics.