Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. I want to introduce you to another great podcast you might enjoy from the CuriousCast podcast network. It's called Whatever Happened To? On this show, global news reporter Erika Vela takes you inside stories and events that captured the entire world's attention.
She revisits the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, the trapped Chilean miners, and remember the ice bucket challenge? On this history podcast, we find out what happened when the cameras turned off and the attention died down. Join Erica as she talks to the people at the heart of each story and uncovers what's happened since. Here's a preview.
It was a Friday like any other. People were going about their business, preparing for the weekend. And then the earth rumbled like a fierce growl. Entire buildings shook. Pieces of concrete fell to the ground, at times narrowly missing those running for safety. This was an earthquake in a nation that was used to them. But this nine-magnitude earthquake, it wasn't only powerful, it was long.
and triggered a massive tsunami which unleashed 15-meter-high waves that washed through small fishing villages and roadways. Cars, homes, and debris floated by as people rushed to their rooftops and watched the swirling water destroy everything in its path. And in a nanosecond, inside the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, everything went black.
Nestled in the towns of Okuma and Futaba is the location of one of the worst nuclear power accidents in recent history. I'm Erica Vela, a reporter for Global News. And this is whatever happened to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis and the Great East Japan earthquake. It's been over nine years since parts of Japan's northeastern coastline were destroyed by this massive three-pronged disaster.
Many people in North America saw the devastation unfold on their televisions, heard it on the radio, or maybe they read about it online. That was also the case for Kazuko Mogul. Except this natural disaster hit close to home. Her hometown is a two-hour drive from the Fukushima prefecture. The house I was born was on the seaside.
Mogul grew up in a small town in the Miyagi Prefecture, one of the areas devastated by the tsunami. And on March 11, 2011, she woke up and turned on her television. I watched the program of NHK, which is Japan Broadcasting Corporation World News. Then I realized a big earthquake and a huge tsunami at Tohoku region. So I knew...
Oh, I have to contact my family right away. Power was out locally, and she had no luck getting through while living in Toronto. Yeah, just I was sitting on the TV all day. And they tried to, you know, contact the people in Japan. And of course, I couldn't. No. Then, you know, I just watched that set all day.
Very shocked. But I told you that the TV shows that tsunami. I feel like watching a movie, not reality. Looks like a bad movie.
The news from home would get worse for Mogul. A few days after the tsunami, she found out four members of her family, her brother, her sister-in-law, her niece, and her brother's granddaughter were all killed by the deadly waves. She discovered many of her former classmates and neighbors also didn't make it out alive.
Officials estimate close to 20,000 people lost their lives because of this natural disaster. And years later, it's a tough reality for Mogul to face. So emptiness...
180 kilometers away from Mogul's hometown is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. It was also rocked by the earthquake and tsunami, and that propelled the country into a nuclear crisis. I found someone who was there and who could tell me what it felt like when the ground shook. Dan Ayotte was working in the offices at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Just a normal day. Got up.
I cleaned up, went to work, there was four of us in the car driving up the ocean road because the main road's too busy and went into the plant. It was my last day. I was flying home Saturday and we were supposed to get a body scan in the afternoon. They take one at the start, one at the end to tell you how much radiation you've picked up. So at three o'clock we were supposed to go for our body scan. About 20 to three I said, okay guys, we're
I better get down there and get that body scan done. Around a quarter to three, I was doing my expense accounts. Then all of a sudden it started to go. Everything started to shake up, down, sideways. And then I just wouldn't quit. It got more intense. So bad you had to sit on the floor. You couldn't stand up. You had no balance. You had to sit down. And things in the office started to cave in. And I crawled underneath the desk and wrote it out for six minutes.
But the other guys I could see on the crew that were under their desk, you could just see the fear in their eyes, and it must have been in mine too, because I really didn't think we were going to get out. I thought the building was going to come down. Ayotte had been traveling to Japan for almost 20 years, working as a nuclear mechanical technician for General Electric Nuclear. And having spent months at a time in the country, earthquakes, they weren't unusual. You get a little shake every once in a while. In Japan, you get a little tremor. But this thing here...
After a minute, and then it went two minutes, and then it just kept getting more intense. I thought, this is the big one. We'll be lucky to get out of this. And the sliding door blew out of the side of the GE office. Things started to cave in. We tried three times to get out of the office, and we couldn't, because you couldn't stand up. We tried to go, and you'd fall down. So we just crawled underneath the desks and waited six minutes. Longest six minutes of my life. But it was, yeah, I didn't think we were going to get out of it.
It was that scary. You look out from underneath the desk and you can see the hydro wires and the hydro poles and they're all swinging back and forth and it just, it was scary. It was scary. After the earthquake stopped, Dan said all he wanted to do was get out of the building. I figured that old thing was going to come down and it was twisting and jumping up and down and making noises and I thought, we got to get out of here. So we went out into the parking lot. There's a picture there of everybody standing in the parking lot.
And they said the building was making noises. I figured we were going to die in that building. So Dan was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape safely. And as he left the office, he grabbed a small disposable camera that he'd bought to capture happy memories of the end of what was supposed to be a successful work trip.
Instead, photos from that very camera show once perfectly paved roadways completely crumbled. Cracks in the ground at least eight inches wide and several meters deep. Wanting to get a closer look at the damage, Dan and one of his colleagues decided to go down to the seashore. It's a place he spent a lot of time over the last several months. He would often eat lunch there or go for a walk during an occasional break. Go down to the seashore.
I noticed the river running inland. And for some reason, I don't know why to this day, whether the big guy was looking after me or what, but I saw that and I had seen tsunamis on TV and stuff. And after that earthquake lasted so long, I thought there's got to be something coming. And we were smart enough to get out of there. Three minutes later, the first wave came in right where we were standing, 40 feet high, and went two kilometers or so inland.
I shouldn't even be here. Scary? Yeah. Lucky? Yeah. Dan says he and his colleagues managed to find higher ground, and they watched as the first wave from the tsunami crashed inland. It didn't look like anything until it hit the shallow area in front of where we were on the hill, and then all of a sudden it just grew like a big black monster out of the Pacific, and in it come
and it was snapping down trees that big like they were matchsticks. It hit them and while there was a building down there, it reminded me of an old hockey rink you'd see in Canada with the big square beams and everything on it. And it was a fish farm where they'd grow fish for sushi and that and send it to Tokyo. That wave come in and that thing was just leveled. And then it hit that cliff down the seashore, broke a big chunk off it, it went in. But we stood there and watched it on the hill and these trees were just flying everywhere.
Dan says he narrowly escaped death that day. Well, I got goosebumps right now just talking about it. We didn't know whether we were high enough or not. We didn't know whether to jump in the car and take off, but we were high enough. And then it was dead silence. You could hear a pin drop. Whatever Happened To is available for free now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.