That was Japan’s coastline when Hermosan Larry Collins and the rest of the Urban Search and Rescue task force from the Los Angeles County Fire Department arrived in the wake of the 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed more than 10,000 people and left another 16,000 unaccounted for.
The team went to the large port cities of Ofunatu and Komaishi, searching dozens of square miles for survivors.
“It’s all got to be searched and we are looking for survivors,” Collins said. “We were in rescue mode when we got there and stayed in rescue mode for the next eight or nine days.”
The team was able to recover bodies, but no live survivors.
“You have lower survivability if you are hit by a tsunami. You drown, you get crushed or you get sucked out to sea,” said Collins, who has helped rescue survivors from collapsed buildings following major earthquakes around the world.
Many residents roamed the devastated area looking for friends, family members or any personal possessions they could recover. There was no rioting or looting as the people of Japan tried to find keepsakes to hold onto.
As people uncovered personal belongings, they put them in visible places for the owners to find. They helped each other as they uncovered wedding photos or a woman’s purse.
“In Japan it is part of their social culture to deal with natural disasters,” Collins said. “The Japanese are very stoic people in the face of adversity.”
The tsunami wiped out landmarks, street blocks no longer existed, and a language barrier made reading maps and road signs difficult, so Collins and his team divided the area into grids to organize the search.
Collins noted similarities between the devastation of hurricanes and the tsunami that hit Japan. The water creates a line; on one side the area is flooded, and on the other side there are piles of washed up debris.
During the tsunami, the water surged to a certain point pushing buildings, vehicles and anything else in its way inland. Once the wave reached its apex, the gravity and ocean drew the water back, but an outline of rubble remained.
“We call this an interface area where we have people still trapped in collapsed buildings that could be alive because the building didn’t go under water, they just got shoved in,” Collins said.
The task force focused its efforts on the interface area, looking for survivors among the mounds of debris.
The Urban Search and Rescue task force is one of only two international search and rescue units sent abroad by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The other is the Fairfax County Fire Department in Virginia.
“The same guys will transition from your local neighborhood firefighters one day, and the next day those same guys are flying out to Japan to do rescues in a big disaster like that,” Collins said.
A day after one team arrived home from the disaster-torn areas of New Zealand, Collins, a fire battalion chief, and 74 other members of the Urban Search and Rescue task force were sent to Japan.
“You could call the task force almost like a SWAT team for the Fire Department,” Collins said. “They are ready to roll 24-7 anywhere in the world.”
Lessons for home
Japan’s devastation reinforced Collins’ concerns for the Southern California coastline if a near-source tsunami strikes.
“As I was watching live shots on CNN when [the tsunami] happened, I was thinking people are dying right now and it is a true calamity,” Collins said. “At the same time the split screen in my head was saying, that is kind of what it could look like here if we got a worst case scenario in Southern California.”
Over the last 20 to 25 years, Collins and some of his colleagues have been working with seismologists from the California Institute of Technology, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center to further study quake preparedness and the hazards after a rupture.
For many years the question lingered whether near source tsunamis pose a hazard to Los Angeles County. Controlled explosions and other research done by scientists discovered that both onshore and offshore thrust faults and underwater landslides caused by vertical cliffs in the sea could cause tsunamis in the coastal cities. At a thrust fault, the earth’s plates ride on top of one another rather than side by side.
“The answer started going from no, to well maybe, and then yes there’s a potential for near-source tsunamis,” Collins said. Â
An effort was launched to put a tsunami evacuation plan in place for Los Angeles County.
“A task force with members from the different coastal cities, the Los Angeles Fire Department, the lifeguards, myself and the Sheriffs Department began hashing out what would be a tsunami plan for the county with each city having its own version of it,” Collins said.
Signs were put up showing the tsunami inundation zones and evacuation routes in coastal cities.
“These were hard fought efforts to secure funding and actually make this happen, because the culture here is no one has ever experienced a big tsunami before,” Collins said. “People don’t assume that we are going to get a big tsunami. It is not part of our culture like it is in Japan.”
But a gap exists in the task force’s tsunami proposal because funding has not been found to equip coastal cities in Los Angeles County with tsunami warning sirens.
“In Japan, I think the tsunami warning sirens saved countless lives,” Collins said.
He encourages people to have their own evacuation or family plan to escape the coast and get to higher ground. Since there are no warning sirens on our beaches, the best indicator is strong ground shaking at the coast. Collins says this is the warning sign to get inland, away from the tsunami inundation zone.
“The take-home for everyone here is, regardless of sirens and reverse 911 warnings, you have to assume if there is strong ground shaking that is breaking windows, and knocking things off of shelves, it’s a big earthquake,” Collins said. “If it lasts 20 seconds or more and you are in these areas, you have to start moving. Get out of the tsunami zone, move inland and wait until it all clears.”
Reverse 911 refers to communications systems such as Hermosa’s Code Red, which delivers emergency phone messages to residents who have signed up for the service. (For more see hermosabch.org.) ER
