![]() ![]() Voltaire's withering satire made it a little harder to be Panglossian-to believe that a benevolent God designed an optimal Earth. In Voltaire's novel Candide the blinkered philosopher Pangloss arrives in Lisbon during the catastrophe, persists in arguing that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," and gets hanged for his trouble. ![]() In 1755, when an earthquake and tsunami killed tens of thousands in Lisbon, the tragedy had a lasting impact on Western thought: It helped demolish the complacent optimism of the day. Some archaeologists have argued, for instance, that a Mediterranean tsunami struck the north shore of Crete a bit over 3,500 years ago the disaster, they say, sent Minoan civilization, one of the most sophisticated of the age, into a tailspin, leading it to succumb to Mycenaean Greeks. Tsunamis strike somewhere in the world almost every year, and giant ones have arguably changed history. But this one was three times that height." Afterward, in the landscape of debris that had been his town, almost the only thing that remained intact was the seawall. "Seismologists had told us to prepare for a tsunami that might be five and a half to six meters high. "We thought we would be safe," Sato says. The seawall was built after that, to a height of 5.5 meters, a little over 18 feet. In 1960, when he was eight, a 14-foot wave killed 41 people in Minamisanriku. It's likely there will be many Minamisanrikus in the decades ahead. In the United States, where a tsunami devastated the Pacific Northwest 300 years ago, when it was sparsely inhabited, geologists say another is inevitable. In the Indian Ocean, where the deadliest tsunami in history killed nearly 230,000 people in 2004, most of them in Indonesia, a similar disaster has been forecast for sometime within the next 30 years. The same is true all over the world, in countries that are much less prepared. Japan's defenses have improved tremendously since then, but its population has tripled. But between 16,000 and 20,000 died because of the tsunami-a death toll comparable to that caused by an earthquake and tsunami in the same region in 1896. The Tohoku earthquake itself-a magnitude 9-did much less damage than it would have in other countries. Together these measures saved many thousands of lives Miki Endo alone may have saved thousands. On March 11 government seismologists had barely stopped hugging their computer monitors to keep them from crashing to the floor when their first tsunami warning went out. High seawalls shield many coastal towns, and well-marked tsunami evacuation routes lead to high ground or to tall, strong buildings. It has spent billions retrofitting old buildings and equipping new ones with shock absorbers. Japan leads the world in preparing for earthquakes and tsunamis. In the morning only ten people remained on the roof. The waves kept coming all night long, and for the first few hours they repeatedly inundated the three-story building. "It's hard to say." Many of the 30 or so other people on the roof tried to hang on to the iron railings at its edge. "I think I was underwater for three or four minutes," he says. Sato survived by climbing a radio antenna on the roof and clinging to it. In Minamisanriku the killed or missing number about 900 of 17,700 inhabitants, including Miki Endo, whose body was not found until April 23. The tsunami eradicated several towns and villages in Tohoku and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Some 16,000 people died that day, most of them along hundreds of miles of coast in the Tohoku region, and nearly 4,000 are still missing. Then dark gray water surged over the top of their building. Wood-frame houses snapped steel girders groaned. They listened to it crush or sweep away everything in its path. From there they watched the tsunami pour over the town's 18-foot-high seawall. Miki Endo, a 24-year-old woman working on the second floor, started broadcasting a warning over the town's loudspeakers: "Please head to higher ground!" Sato and most of his group headed up to the roof. Sato and a few dozen others ran next door to the town's three-story disaster-readiness center. When the ground finally stopped heaving, after five excruciating minutes, Minamisanriku was still mostly intact. ![]()
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