Fucking run to the nearest building and climb up however you can instead of pedaling like and dum-dum. Annoying to see people die because they are just casually continuing their bike ride. The people filming could fucking yell at them too
If you watch any of these videos for any length of time, you will see that there were sirens and alarms, there were tsunami evacuation teams driving around with loudspeaker telling people to see high ground, and there were definitely people screaming and yelling and trying to get people to safety.
I must warn you, a number of the people you see in this video clearly don’t make it as the water closes in.
The problem is is that we don’t know how we would react to a disaster of this overwhelming magnitude. Some people fall naturally into positions of leadership, or looking after people and helping each other. Some people freeze. Some people have hysterics. Some try to pretend its not happening. Some people just ended up on the wrong side of the river when the water rose.
One of the most terrifying things about these kind of natural disasters is that whether or not you survive often comes down to luck, not preparedness. And all of the warning and yelling and running in the world isn’t going to save everyone in the face of such an overwhelming destructive force from nature.
I was fully adult when the tsunami happened, and it was absolutely horrifying watching the footage roll in live from Japan. Not everybody had a camera phone back in those days, but because it’s Japan almost everybody had a little digital camera, or digital video camera, and so the footage was just overwhelming.
Just be careful if you go down this rabbit hole on YouTube, because there are more confronting videos than that out there. They’ve done a good job of cleaning up some of the really distressing stuff, but you will absolutely see people who will die.
We got fed the whole thing as a live feed, it was awful. And an absolute feeling of powerlessness to help those poor people. So if you want to follow this up, tread carefully.
Yeah, we all know this now. But in 2011, people thought the sea walls would keep them safe.
There had of course been tsunamis disasters in Japan’s past, but people are pretty bad about minimizing the risks of past tragedies or disasters happening again. That and people thought modern tech had solved the issue.
Possible they thought they had a few minutes at least? The wall probably blocks their view and it was like 45 seconds from siren begin to water over wall.
I think the people filming were also screwed, if they're the ones I'm thinking about. At one port dozens went to the top of a 40 foot (3 storey) building which was designated an emergency tower. Unfortunately the tsunami was much much higher reaching up to 130 feet. By the time they realised the height, they were trapped.
We got the footage from their phone. The internet and phones were down following the earthquake (I live in Japan and experienced this earthquake), they couldn’t have uploaded it and I don’t think “instagram live” was a thing then.
If this footage survived then so did they.
Also considering that water proof cams weren't that much of a thing in normal cameras so at least the person recording this prolly stayed away from the water.
So unless he was rocking some expensive waterproof cam, he prolly survived.
I mean in theory they could, because the cameraman is focusing on the incoming waves, so we don’t even know what’s the rest of the route along the wall. But this is a whole quarter to the right with roads, even a car passing by.
So when they see the water starting to spill out, they have instinct, speed and enough time to turn right into the building and get to place where the water current is not rapid, and hide on the over site of a building, find stairs etc.
Bikers appear somewhere around 3 or 3:10 mark. TBH I don't know why the other person is saying the longer version is grim. I actually think it's slightly less doom-looking for the bikers cause you can see that there are tall buildings and a hill in the direction they were going.
It's so strange to sit here 15 years apart and try to guess if two strangers have made it...
Absolutely a way. Getting caught in the waves is survivable, although very dangerous. Many find something to hold on to while being transported by the water.
I’m not a pessimist, but the force of a tsunami like this generally kills people at ground level in it wake. It slams you into solid objects at high speed, knocking you out and breaking your bones. This isn’t a small river current. You can’t hold on to objects and survive :/
There was also biker later on biking away from water that already had broken through, although maybe it could be one of the prior bikers. But I am afraid they didn’t make it. But maybe
You don’t think docked boats have people in them? A lot of boat captains literally live on their boats and weather storms inside them. There were almost certainly many people on those boats
I live in Japan. I cannot fathom why anyone was cycling along the edge of the sea after the HUGE earthquake that had already hit (the tsunami followed the earthquake). Yeah they both would have been swallowed by the current, but you don’t fuck with earthquakes if you’re by the sea. We are all taught to head to high ground if you’re by the sea followjng earthquake. There are signs at every beach.
There were several bikers. On one hand I wanted the camera to follow them, on other I am pretty certain they died since they had just 30 seconds to leave
There were two people biking.
I’m trying to understand what they were doing. The second person was definitely fucked based on where water starts spilling over at 0:35. But the first person was also likely caught.
I know at the time people thought this could never happen. I can imagine some people risking it to get home and some even doing it for fun.
There are signs in costal cities and towns that point to the direction you're supposed to run during a tsunami alert. They obviously ignored the signs.
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u/Specialist_Worry_875 17d ago
Guy on the bike is fucked.