Tag Archives: Earthquake

Dwindling hopes for Ecuador, death toll over 400

Ecuador's President Correa embraces a resident after the earthquake in the town of Canoa

y Julia Symmes Cobb and Ana Isabel Martinez

PEDERNALES/CANOA, Ecuador (Reuters) – Earthquake-stricken Ecuador faced the grim reality of recovering more bodies than survivors as rescue efforts went into a third day on Tuesday and the death toll climbed over 400 in the poor South American country.

Praying for miracles, distraught family members beseeched rescue teams to find missing loved ones as they dug through debris of flattened homes, hotels, and stores in the hardest-hit Pacific coastal region.

Meanwhile, a moved President Rafael Correa, visiting the disaster zone, said the quake had inflicted between $2 billion and $3 billion of damage on the OPEC nation’s already-fragile economy.

The damage from the quake could knock between two and three percentage points off gross domestic product growth, he told reporters. “Let’s not deceive ourselves, it’s going to be a long struggle … Reconstruction for years, billions (of dollars) in investment.”

In Pedernales, a devastated rustic beach town, crowds gathered behind yellow tape to watch firemen and police sift through rubble overnight. The town’s soccer stadium was serving as a makeshift relief center and a morgue.

“Find my brother! Please!” shouted Manuel, 17, throwing his arms up to the sky in front of a small corner store where his younger brother had been working when the quake struck.

When an onlooker said recovering a body would at least give him the comfort of burying his sibling, he yelled: “Don’t say that!”

But for Manuel and hundreds of other anxious Ecuadoreans with relatives missing, time was running out.

As of Tuesday, rescue efforts would become more of a search for corpses, Interior Minister Jose Serrano told Reuters.

The death toll stood at 413, but was expected to rise.

The quake has injured at least 2,600 people, damaged over 1,500 buildings, and left 18,000 people spending the night in shelters, according to the government.

In many isolated villages or towns struck by the quake, survivors struggled without water, power, or transport. Rescue operations continued, but the sickly, sweet stench of death told them what they were most likely to find.

“There are bodies crushed in the wreckage and from the smell it’s obvious they are dead,” said Army Captain Marco Borja in the small tourist village of Canoa.

“Today we brought out between seven and eight bodies.”

Nearly 400 rescue workers flew in from various Latin American neighbors, along with 83 specialists from Switzerland and Spain, to boost rescue efforts. The United States said it would dispatch a team of disaster experts while Cuba was sending a team of doctors.

To finance the costs of the emergency, some $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders was immediately activated, the government said.

Ecuador also announced late Monday it had signed off on a credit line for $2 billion from the China Development Bank to finance public investment. China has been the largest financier of Ecuador since 2009 and the credit had been under negotiation before the quake.

(Repoprting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Pedernales and Ana Isabel Martinez in Canoa; Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Trapped Ecuador survivors searching for hope

Red Cross members, military and police officers work at a collapsed area after an earthquake struck off the Pacific coast, at Tarqui neighborhood in Manta

By Julia Symmes Cobb

PEDERNALES, Ecuador (Reuters) – During a terrifying five hours trapped in the rubble of her own restaurant, Filerma Rayo almost lost hope.

“I was yelling and yelling and then, at the end, I started to think I would die there,” said Rayo, 33, as she nursed a crushed foot, pinned by a falling piece of cement when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook Ecuador on Saturday.

The Andean nation’s worst quake in a decade killed more than 270 people, injured another 2,000, flattened buildings and tore apart roads along the Pacific coast.

“It was my siblings who saved us, the rescue teams hadn’t arrived yet,” said Rayo, who runs a restaurant on the bottom floor of a now-shattered hotel in the worst-hit town of Pedernales, a rustic beach location on the Pacific coast.

Her three brothers and sisters, also from Pedernales, came looking for Rayo and her husband, who suffered head injuries, after the quake. Guided by her shouts, they managed to remove the rubble and pull her out around midnight, well before emergency crews arrived.

Nearly 100 neighbours in Pedernales were not so lucky.

They died when the earthquake struck, sending pastel top floors crashing to the ground, punching holes in the façade of the church on the main square and obliterating a local hotel, its roof jack-knifed and crumbling.

Many residents, including Rayo and her family, spent a restless Sunday night sleeping outside on mattresses in the muggy tropical night, wary of aftershocks.

CORPSES IN STADIUM

Others, too uneasy to sleep, watched from the sidelines as firefighters continued rescue operations in some buildings, calling for silence so they could listen for cries for help.

More than 600 people were treated for injuries at tents in the town’s still-intact football stadium, or were transported by ambulance or helicopter to regional hospitals.

Most of the corpses recovered were taken to the stadium and laid out under tents. Only four of 91 had not been identified by families. Wakes and burials were being quickly arranged.

Queues for supplies like bottled water, blankets and food snaked along the stadium walls, as government and Red Cross workers rushed with aid supplies to the lush, hilly zone next to Pacific beaches.

Residents complained that a lack of electricity was keeping them from using mobile phones to contact loved ones.

Many lost all their possessions.

“There’s nothing left of the houses and nowhere safe to stay,” said housewife Betty Reyna, 44, who was keeping watch over a dozen members of her family as they slept under a gas station awning early on Monday.

Reyna, her daughter and son had travelled from the capital Quito in search of relatives when they heard about the destruction in her hometown.

They were able to find some family members but Reyna had still not seen her parents or other daughter, though she had made contact with them and knew they were largely unharmed. Her father, however, had suffered head injuries.

“We’re taking everyone back to Quito as soon as we can, at least until things calm down here.”

More than 1,000 policemen, brought in to guarantee calm, patrolled Pedernales’ streets ahead of an expected visit by President Rafael Correa.

Rayo hopes she and her neighbours will get the support they need to rebuild their homes and businesses in the long term, but her immediate request is simple.

“We need everything,” she said. “I couldn’t even get pain medication at the medical tent.”

(Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Bernadette Baum)

Japan quake survivors face low food supply, closed factories

By Minami Funakoshi and Kaori Kaneko

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Japanese share market fell more than 3 percent on Monday after a series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.3 magnitude struck a southern manufacturing hub, killing at least 42 people and forcing major companies to close factories.

About 30,000 rescue workers were scouring the rubble for survivors and handing out food to those unable to return to their homes following the quakes which struck Kyushu island from Thursday. The biggest hit near Kumamoto city early on Saturday.

“There are still missing people. We want to make further efforts to rescue and save people and prioritize human lives,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament, adding he aimed to declare the region a disaster zone to free up reconstruction funds.

The Nikkei stock index ended 3.4 percent lower, hit by a stronger yen and as investors weighed the impact of the disaster on manufacturers’ supply chains and insurers.

Factories for major manufacturers including Toyota, Sony and Honda were closed, disrupting supply chains around the country.

Japan’s atomic regulator declared three nuclear plants in the region safe, giving a degree of comfort to a country deeply scarred by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 that was sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.

All commercial flights to the damaged Kumamoto airport were canceled and the bullet train service to the region was suspended.

Food was in short supply as roads remained cut off by landslides. Evacuees made an SOS signal out of chairs at a school playground, hoping to catch the attention of supply helicopters, Japanese media reported.

“Yesterday, I ate just one piece of tofu and a rice ball,” said the mayor of one of the areas affected. “What we’re most worried about now is food.”

Of more than 500 quakes hitting Kyushu since Thursday, more than 70 have been at least a four on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

DESPERATE SEARCH

The Kumamoto region is an important manufacturing hub and home to Japan’s only operating nuclear station.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government would “take all the necessary measures” to support companies affected by the disaster and the economy more broadly, including tapping into reserve funds of 350 billion yen ($3.24 billion).

Abe said a sales tax increase next year would go ahead barring a financial crisis or major natural disaster, without elaborating on whether the quakes qualified as such a disaster.

On the stock market, Sony Corp and Toyota Motor led the sharp falls among manufacturers, dropping 6.8 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. Nissan Motor and Honda Motor both lost about 3 percent. Insurers and utilities were also sold, with nuclear plant operator Kyushu Electric Power slumping nearly 8 percent.

Toyota said it would suspend production at plants across Japan after the quakes disrupted its supply chain.

Electronics giant Sony said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended. One of the company’s major customers for the sensors is Apple. Honda said production at its motorcycle plant in southern Japan would remain suspended through Friday.

Numerous aftershocks have rattled the region with one of 5.8 magnitude on Monday evening. There were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries.

Automotive chipmaker Renesas Electronics said earlier the aftershocks were keeping it from installing replacement equipment at a quake-hit plant.

The Kumamoto government said 42 people had been killed and nine were missing.

Thirty three people have been confirmed dead in Saturday’s quake and nine in the smaller tremor just over 24 hours earlier. The government said about 190 of the injured were in serious condition and some 110,000 people had been displaced.

Rescuers digging with their bare hands dragged some elderly survivors, still in pyjamas, out of the rubble and onto makeshift stretchers made of tatami mats.

“We can’t take a bath, we don’t have any clothes to change into – we just have what we ran out in,” a woman at one evacuation center told TBS television.

Public broadcaster NHK showed footage of forests and rice fields torn apart by the quake, saying one 50 km (31 miles) strip shifted almost 2 meters (6 feet) sideways.

Quakes are common in Japan, part of the seismically active “Ring of Fire” which sweeps from the South Pacific islands, up through Indonesia, Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of North, Central and South America.

At the other end of the ring this weekend, Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades killed at least 262 people, caused devastation in coastal towns and left an unknown number trapped in ruins.

A 9 magnitude quake and tsunami in northern Japan in March 2011 caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, shutting down the nuclear industry for safety checks and sending radiation spewing across the countryside.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the 2011 tsunami.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Elaine Lies, William Mallard, Shinichi Soashiro, Chris Gallagher, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Tim Kelly and Thomas Wilson; Writing by Stephen Coates; Editing by Robert Birsel and Ian Geoghegan)

Magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes Southern Japan

A woman reacts at a health and welfare center acting as an evacuation center after an earthquake in Mashiki town, Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan

(Reuters) – A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck southern Japan early on Saturday, just over 24 hours after a quake killed nine people and injured at least 1,000 in the same area.

The Saturday quake triggered a tsunami advisory, though it was later lifted and no irregularities were reported at three nuclear power plants in the area, Japanese media reported.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the Saturday quake though there were several reports of damage, including some collapsed buildings and cracked roads.

The epicenter of the quake was near the city of Kumamoto and measured at a shallow depth of 10 km, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake on Thursday evening in the same region was of 6.4 magnitude.

“Thursday’s quake might have been a foreshock of this one,” Shinji Toda, a professor at Tohoku University, told national broadcaster NHK.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said the Saturday quake was 7.1 magnitude and it initially issued a tsunami advisory, which identifies the presence of a marine threat and asks people to leave coastal regions, for the Ariake and Yatsushiro seas.

NHK said the advisory suggested a possible wave of one meter in height. The advisory was later lifted.

Several aftershocks rattled the region later on Saturday, including one of 5.8 magnitude.

NHK quoted an official at a hospital near the epicenter as saying it had lost power after the Saturday quake and had to use its generators.

Most of the casualties in the Thursday quake came in the town of Mashiki, near the epicenter, where several houses collapsed.

A magnitude 9 quake in March 2011, to the north of Tokyo, touched off a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima. Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the tsunami.

(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Writing by John Stonestreet; Editing by Robert Birsel and Martin Howell)

Aftershocks rattle Japan from strong quake ~ 7.4 Hits Friday

Local residents wrap themselves in blankets as they sit on the road in front of the town office building after an earthquake in Mashiki town, Kumamoto in april 2016

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) – Aftershocks rattled southwestern Japan on Friday after a strong quake the night before killed nine people, injured at least 1,000 and cut power and water across the region, forcing the temporary shutdown of several auto and electronics factories.

By afternoon, more than 130 aftershocks had hit the area around the city of Kumamoto in the wake of the initial 6.4 magnitude quake the night before. Officials said the frequency was tapering off but the risk of further strong aftershocks will remain for about a week.

While the magnitude of Thursday’s quake was much lower than that of the 9.0 March 11, 2011 quake that touched off a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, the intensity was similar because it struck on land and at a much shallower depth.

“We managed to huddle into a space, that’s why we were saved,” one man told NHK national television after he and his family were rescued from their collapsed house two hours after the quake hit. “We’re all safe, that’s what counts.”

More than 44,000 people initially fled to schools and community centers, some spending the night outside after the first quake hit around 9:30 p.m.

Roads cracked, houses crumbled, and tiles cascaded from the roof of the 400-year-old Kumamoto Castle in the center of the city.

Among those pulled from the wreckage was an eight-month-old baby girl, wrapped in a blanket and passed hand to hand by firefighters. Several hospitals had to evacuate patients.

Japanese stocks ended down 0.4 percent, with the impact of the quake limited primarily to regional shares that could experience some direct impact. Regional utility Saibu Gas Co Ltd finished 2.7 percent lower.

Several companies, including Honda Motor Corp, suspended operations at plants in the area.

More than 3,000 troops, police and firemen were dispatched to the area from around Japan, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said more would be sent if needed.

“We will do everything in our power to ensure the safety of local residents,” Abe told a parliamentary committee.

Most of the dead came from Mashiki, a town of around 34,000 people near the epicenter of the quake, where firefighters battled a blaze late on Thursday. Daylight showed splintered houses under tiled roofs and an apartment building whose ground floor was pulverized, where two people died.

“I want to go home, but we couldn’t do anything there,” one boy at an evacuation center told TBS television as he bounced a baby in his arms.

Though the intensity of Thursday’s quake on the Japanese scale matched that of the March 2011 quake that left nearly 20,000 dead, the absence of a tsunami helped keep the death toll down.

Service on the Shinkansen superfast train in Kyushu was halted after one train derailed, and highways were closed after some sections collapsed. About 12,200 households were without electricity as of 12 p.m. (0500 GMT), according to Kyushu Electric Power Co Inc;, while some 58,000 lacked water.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there were no irregularities at three nuclear plants on the southern major island of Kyushu and nearby Shikoku.

Sony Corp., Mitsubishi Electric Corp and tire maker Bridgestone Corp. also suspended operations at factories in the area.

The 2011 quake temporarily crippled part of Japan’s auto supply chain, but some companies have since adjusted the industry’s “Just in Time” production philosophy in a bid to limit any repeat of the costly disruption.

(Additional reporting by Joshua Hunt, Naomi Tajitsu and Tokyo newsroom; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Wednesday Earthquake in Myanmar a 6.9

YANGON (Reuters) – An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 struck northwestern Myanmar on Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, sending strong tremors through Myanmar, eastern India, Bangladesh and parts of Nepal.

There were no immediate reports of major damage or loss of life as a result of the tremor, located around 100 km (62 miles) north-northwest of the city of Monywa at an estimated depth of 134 km.

But around 50 people suffered mainly leg injuries in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka and northeastern city of Sylhet as they fled homes and other buildings during the quake, according to police.

Witnesses in Bagan, central Myanmar, said some tourists left their hotel rooms and stood outside when they felt the tremor. They saw no sign of damage to buildings, however.

“We haven’t heard any reports of casualties or damage,” said an official from Myanmar’s meteorological department based in the capital Naypyitaw. “So far as I know the epicenter wasn’t in a densely populated area.”

Electricity was cut off in parts of northeastern India as thermal power stations were shut down as a precautionary measure.

“I felt the tremor three times. I saw people rushing out,” said Rupak De Chowdhuri, a Reuters photographer in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata.

Britain’s Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who were visiting the northeastern Indian state of Assam on Wednesday, were safe, the British High Commission in New Delhi said.

Tremors were also felt in eastern Nepal.

“We felt the quake. But it was not so strong to make us flee our homes,” said Dinesh Rai, a resident of Nepal’s eastern state of Jhapa.

In March, 2011, at least 74 people were killed in an earthquake in Myanmar near its borders with Thailand and Laos.

(Reporting by Aung Hla Tun in YANGON, New Delhi bureau, Biswajyoti Das in GUWAHATI, Rupak De Chowdhuri in KOLKATA, Jatindra Dash in BHUBANESWAR, Gopal Sharma in KATHMANDU and Ruma Paul in DHAKA; Writing by Rajesh Kumar Singh; Editing by Douglas Busvine and Mike Collett-White)

Earthquake hits Southern Japan

Broken dishes are seen at a restaurant after an earthquake in Kumamoto, southern Japan

By Kiyoshi Takenaka

TOKYO (Reuters) – An earthquake of magnitude 6 hit southern Japan on Thursday, bringing down some buildings and injuring dozens of people, local media reported, but the nuclear regulator reported no problems at power plants.

The quake struck 11 km (7 miles) east of the city of Kumamoto, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It initially said the magnitude was 6.2 but revised it down. Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the quake registered 6.4.

There was no tsunami warning, but Japan’s chief government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, said several buildings had collapsed. He gave no more details.

“We intend to do the utmost to grasp the situation,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters. “I’m now planning to hear what we have gathered on the situation.”

The Kyodo news agency reported that around 40 people were being treated at a hospital in Kumamoto city, some of them seriously injured.

A fire also broke out in Mashiki, a town of about 34,000 people near the epicenter of the quake. NHK broadcaster showed footage of firefighters tackling a blaze at a building.

Some 16,000 households in the area were without electricity and 38,000 homes had no gas supplies in Kumamoto, Japanese media reported.

At least one aftershock struck the region.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there were no irregularities at three nuclear plants on the southernmost island of Kyushu and nearby Shikoku.

Some high-speed trains were halted as a precaution.

Japanese media showed watermelons falling from shelves at a supermarket in Kumamoto, located around 1,900 km (1,150 miles) west of Tokyo.

A quake of 9 magnitude quake struck offshore north of Tokyo in March 2011, causing tsunami waves along the coast which killed nearly 20,000 people and triggered a meltdown at a nuclear power plant.

(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Editing by Robert Birsel and Mike Collett-White)

Strong earthquake in Pakistan leaves six dead

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Six people were killed across northern Pakistan although there appeared to be no widespread damage after a strong earthquake rattled major cities across South Asia at the weekend, authorities said on Monday.

The 6.6-magnitude quake on Sunday startled residents in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and forced some in high-rise buildings to flee into the streets of the Indian capital, New Delhi.

It was also felt in Islamabad and in Lahore in Pakistan’s east, about 630 km (390 miles) from the quake’s epicenter in remote northeastern Afghanistan, just inside the border with Tajikistan and across a narrow finger of land from Chitral – a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said five people were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Another was killed in northern Gilgit-Baltistan state, the NDMA said. At least seven people were reported injured across Pakistan, many of them in the northwestern frontier city of Peshawar.

There were no immediate reports of widespread damage in either Afghanistan or India, despite the quake rattling buildings in all three countries for more than a minute.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a depth of about 210 km (130 miles).

Despite its depth, the quake still caused widespread panic in areas such as Chitral, a Reuters witness and a villager in the area said.

“It was a very dangerous situation, because our houses were already damaged from recent rainfall,” said Isa Khan, whose home in the village of Susoom, about 25 km (15 miles) north of Chitral, suffered moderate damage.

Most of the homes in his village are made of mud and brick. “We saw a lot of walls being damaged in front of us,” Khan said.

Pakistan’s NDMA said in a statement the air force had been asked to conduct an aerial photography survey to assess the damage in mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Khan said Chitral residents were still awaiting compensation after a 7.5-magnitude quake hit the area on Oct. 26 last year, killing more than 300 people and destroying thousands of homes.

The Hindu Kush area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is seismically active, with quakes often felt across a region where the Indian and Eurasian continental plates collide.

Just over a decade ago, a 7.6-magnitude quake in another part of northern Pakistan killed about 75,000 people.

(Additional reporting by Gul Hammad Farooqi in CHITRAL and Jibran Ahmed in PESHAWAR; Editing by Paul Tait and Himani Sarkar)

‘Hearts are in pieces’ five years after tsunami hits Japan

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan (Reuters) – Japan on Friday mourned the thousands who lost their lives in a massive earthquake and tsunami five years ago that turned towns to matchwood and triggered the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The nine-magnitude quake struck offshore on a chilly Friday, sparking huge black waves along a vast swathe of coastline and killing nearly 20,000 people.

The tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, where meltdowns in three reactors spewed radiation over a wide area of the countryside, contaminating water, food and air.

Naoto Kan, the prime minister at the time, has said he feared he would have to evacuate the Japanese capital Tokyo and that Japan’s very existence could have been in peril.

More than 160,000 people were evacuated from nearby towns and some 10 percent still live in temporary housing across Fukushima prefecture. Most have settled outside their hometowns and have begun new lives.

Some areas remain no-go zones due to high radiation. Demonstrators in front of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) bore signs saying, “Give me back my hometown!”

At cemeteries along the devastated coastline, in front of buildings hollowed out by the wave, and on beaches, families gathered to offer flowers and incense, bowing their heads and wiping away tears.

Flags at central government buildings were at half-mast, some draped in black.

In coastal Rikuzentakata, which was flattened by a wave as much as 56 feet high and lost seven percent of its population along with its entire downtown, pain remains strong.

“The reality is that we still feel the scars here, and there are still many struggling to restart their lives,” said 65-year-old Yashichi Yanashita, a retired city hall official. The four-story city hall was inundated by the wave.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE

At 2:46 p.m., the moment the quake hit, bells rang out in downtown Tokyo and people around the nation bowed their heads in a moment of silence. All the trains on Tokyo’s vast underground paused for a minute.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Emperor Akihito bowed in front of a stage laden with white and yellow flowers in a Tokyo ceremony attended by 1,200 people, including survivors from the stricken area.

“Father, that day, I called your mobile phone so many times, but you didn’t answer … ” said Masakiyo Kimura, who lost his parents to the wave in the city of Onagawa.

“Our house was completely torn from its foundation. Nothing remained except for the pair of matching teacups father and mother used, lying on top of each other.”

Billions of dollars in government spending have helped stricken communities rise from the ruins, including elevating the earth to protect them from future waves and cleaning radiation-contaminated land, but much remains to be done for thousands still languishing in barracks-like temporary housing.

“I get the feeling that the number of people who don’t know what to do, who aren’t even trying, is increasing,” said Kazuo Sato, a former fisherman from Rikuzentakata. “Their hearts are in pieces.”

RECONSTRUCTION CONTINUES

Government spending on reconstruction is set to dip from the start of the new fiscal year in April. But Abe pledged continued support.

“Many people are still leading uncomfortable lives in the affected areas. There are many who cannot return to their beloved homes because of the accident at the nuclear power plant,” he said at the ceremony.

“We commit ourselves to … providing care for their minds and bodies, forming new local communities and supporting industrial development of the affected areas.”

Full recovery will take still longer.

“Infrastructure is recovering, hearts are not. I thought time would take care of things,” said Eiki Kumagai, a Rikuzentakata volunteer fireman who lost 51 colleagues, many killed as they guided others to safety.

“I keep seeing the faces of those who died… There’s so much regret, I can’t express it.”

(Reporting by Elaine Lies, Editing by Linda Sieg, Nick Macfie and)

Pain lingers five years later as tsunami-hit Japan town rises from ruins

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan (Reuters) – Time has done little to help Japanese volunteer fireman Eiki Kumagai with memories of March 11, 2011, when he clung to some steps as a huge black tsunami surged through his town, washing away people he knew as they cried for help.

“We were recovering bodies,” the 48-year-old recalls. “This is a small town, we knew them all. Women, children, old people. There were so many, we had two layers.”

Five years after Rikuzentakata lost 7 percent of its population and its entire downtown to the 49-foot wave touched off by a magnitude 9 earthquake, a huge construction project has raised its center from future waves.

But while the physical landscape has been changed for the better, emotionally many people in the town of 20,000 remain frozen in grief and psychologists say it may take several generations to ease the trauma fully.

“The year of the tsunami, I was angry at the wave,” said Kazuo Sato, a former oyster fisherman who can still barely look at the sea. He lost 100 friends and relatives.

“What’s left is regret, and that’s getting worse. We could have saved so many more people.”

The town center has been transformed with 5 million cubic tonnes of earth scraped from a nearby mountain and shaped by a fleet of backhoes into mounds up to 46 feet high.

Cranes loom over a towering seawall and new roads snake over the hills.

Home building will finally start this summer, offering hope for 1,400 households still in barracks-like temporary housing.

Officials, including Mayor Futoshi Toba, deplore regulations that delayed construction and worry that with the passing of time, attention will be diverted from a recovery only 60 percent complete. National funds for rebuilding will dip with the new fiscal year from April.

Many also worry that construction for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo will hamper the rebuilding of the town.

“If construction overlaps, there won’t be enough workers and wages will rise, making houses more expensive,” said Toba, who watched helplessly from the city hall roof as the town was destroyed. His wife, with whom he had spoken moments before the quake, was killed.

“Why did the government want the Olympics in 2020? I think they could easily have hosted them four years later.”

SPRING SNOW

Some residents say the new embankments are uncomfortable reminders of how much their lives have changed.

“I think probably a lot of people have complicated feelings,” said city official Tsuyoshi Yamada. “But their feelings of wanting to live in a safe place are stronger.”

Long-suppressed feelings of anguish are emerging as life slips back into routines, but a stigma against mental illness in Japan makes many people reluctant to seek help.

“They keep their feelings shut tight in their chests out of a sense that others have suffered even more,” said psychologist Kiyoka Yukimoto. “For this city to really recover, they need mental health services.”

Volunteer firemen, who took to the streets telling people to flee as the water loomed, have particularly painful memories. One man began weeping as he recalled 51 colleagues who lost their lives.

“A couple of guys went down to check on an elderly man, even though I said we had no more time. None of them came back,” Kumagai said.

Toba, whose duties kept him from searching for his wife or seeing his children after the quake, said feelings were complex.

“It always snows around 3/11, even though it should be spring. But the weather reminds us of that day and everybody remembers those who died,” he said.

“At the same time, it is five years, so we shouldn’t just talk about gloomy things. We need to look forward and build a place where children can talk about their dreams.”

(Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Linda Sieg, Robert Birsel)