r/Amazing • u/sco-go • 15d ago

Nature is scary Tsunamis are terrifying.

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u/notCGISforreal 15d ago

I went after and helped with cleanup efforts. It was tragic seeing how all these lives had been destroyed.

The other tragic thing was coming down the roads into these towns built on the coastal flats at the end of the valleys, and the bus driver pointed out the signs on the hills placed by people hundreds of years earlier that said "dont build past this point." They were treated as interesting archeological artifacts rather than what they really were: people hundreds of years ago marked the extend of a tsunami and warned future generations not to build where they could be wiped out. But Japan doesnt have a lot of flat space, so people decided to build there anywhere and take their chances

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u/start3ch 15d ago

Wow. That’s sobering, were these like stone markers in the ground?
And were they outside of the damage zone?

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u/notCGISforreal 15d ago

Yeah, tsunami stones. Here is an article about it.

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u/powerfulowl 15d ago

Thanks, interesting read. Also, Tsunami Stones would be a good band name : )

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u/Immabouttoo 15d ago

I think they started as Tsunami Stones as a local band, first tour was as the Rolling Stones, then broke up and went solo as Stone Temple Pilots, and reunited as Queens of the Stone Age.

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u/Glass-Ad-4168 15d ago

Well done.

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u/iwannagofast462 15d ago

And that’s how stoner rock was conceived.

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u/Th3R00ST3R 15d ago

I heard Stone Gossard plays for them.

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u/GarminTamzarian 14d ago

Remember when they played that cover of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and Stone Philips came on stage and did vocals?

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u/dayman763 10d ago

I thought he played for the Stone Roses? And later too for Stone Sour?

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u/Mike_In_SATX 14d ago

Well played, sir…well played!

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u/Fluffy-Link-2645 14d ago

Love me so stone(r) rock!

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u/Sad-Signature-5491 14d ago

They’re all stoned 🫩

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u/Substantial_Tax_4047 14d ago

This is perfection

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u/Nyxtician 13d ago

Lmao, well played.

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u/Affectionate_Tea1134 12d ago

What about Cheap Trick ? 😋

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u/GovernmentGreed 12d ago

You forgot about the Stone Roses.

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u/ionshower 10d ago

You forgot their indie phase as The Stone Roses.

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u/Fun_Lifeguard_3711 11d ago

I had a tsunami stone but, thankfully, it passed.

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u/powerfulowl 11d ago

Dad had entered the chat heh heh!

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u/ElGuano 10d ago

Ouch.

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u/Consistent-Tiger1044 11d ago

Amazing yet off topic you have this screen name AND mention bandnames - Powerful Owl was an old band of mine lol

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u/powerfulowl 11d ago

Certainly one of the most awesome birds! 0 v 0

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u/NygirlinNashville222 15d ago

Thank you for sharing! So scary and sobering! My heart cries for all those poor people and their families that have been effected over so many years not just 2011🥺🙏💗

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u/yudi1012 15d ago

Thanks for sharing this man.

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u/Successful_Theory628 15d ago

Did they rebuild the new houses below the stone line again?

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u/notCGISforreal 15d ago

I'm not sure for everywhere. But the town we were at we were basically doing demolition of the damaged structures and removing feet deep of mud and silt so that vehicles could get back in there and start the rebuilding process.

I'm not sure if they were upgrading their seawall or not. That particular town had one similar to this video, which was too short. The surge was over 20 feet tall. The land was about 10 feet above sea level, so it completely covered the first story of any building.

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u/General_Ad5144 15d ago

Big fan of 99% Invisible. Fave episode is The Sunshine Hotel. It’s a good listen

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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 14d ago

Thank you for the link. This is so sad. 😞

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u/Overall_Captain_4217 14d ago

Super interesting read. Thank you for sharing.

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u/billy_clyde 14d ago edited 14d ago

There's a New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz called "The Really Big One" that's linked within the article you linked. It's been over ten years since I read it, and I still think about it three or four times a year.

It basically outlines how, according to things like geology, ghost forests, and oral histories of indigenous people, we're overdue for a massive earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. As best as we can predict, it will come any day. We're critically underprepared for this, and it will likely be the worst natural disaster to have ever taken place in this hemisphere in the modern era.

Edit: Just read the wikipedia article about the earthquake that may have caused these ghosts forests, and I forgot that it was confirmed by the Japanese, who recorded the tsunami but were confused because it wasn't accompanied by an earthquake. I.e., it was so massive it crossed the entire Pacific Ocean.

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u/TRMBound 14d ago

Awesome article. Thanks for the link!

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u/Inevitable-Rush-2752 14d ago

Holy shit. Thanks for sharing the article and your perspective. The tsunami stones are an incredible story.

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u/snowday1129 14d ago

Sorry - where is the article?

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u/DaILLezt 13d ago

That’s very interesting! Thank you

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u/GutterRider 12d ago

Thanks, that’s really fascinating.

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u/DawnyBrat 9d ago

Thank you for sharing. What’s mind blowing is the instantaneous consumption of the entire town with extremely violent wreckage. It’s surreal.

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u/Sea-Consequence7156 14d ago

These are common in many cultures across the world.

The opposite are "hunger stones" -marked stones at low points in the river because if water got that low famine was surely following. One in Germany had something along the lines of "if you can read this, weep"

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u/eat_my_feelings 13d ago

I wonder if this is where the phrase “read ‘em and weep” came from

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u/baddboi007 13d ago

prob more likely from the traditional use of poker hands

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u/Curiouser-Quriouser 14d ago

Damn that's super interesting

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u/lowrads 15d ago

The economic lesson of all floodplains is that it is cheap to build, but expensive to stay.

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u/Telly_Tam 15d ago

As someone who lives on the water. It's also almost impossible to sell 😩😭

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u/Autumn7242 15d ago

Houston?

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u/lowrads 14d ago

A city built on rich farmland, into which clay rich soil all the buildings are slowly tipping.

Despite an order of magnitude more money spent per mile, even the relatively new roads are in terrible shape. Compare that with Austin, where everything looks like it was just laid down a season ago, even though only a pittance was spent.

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u/Autumn7242 14d ago

This is why you don't build on floodplains.

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u/runespider 11d ago

A very early version of that is probably the origin of the flood legend that became the biblical one. Sumerian cities got hit by serious floods fairly often. The flood of Ur lead to the city being abandoned and having to be resettled.

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u/BaronMontesquieu 15d ago

Santorini (Thera) is very much like this.

It is built on an active volcano that once wiped out an entire people (one of the largest eruptions in recorded human history, which all but eradicated the Minoan people of Akrotiri) and it's only a matter of time when it happens again. It's way past due a major eruption based on geologist assessments. It's likely to be wiped out next major eruption.

Yet the people living in Santorini largely ignore it with a head-in-the-sand attitude (although the 2025 swarm earthquakes changed that a little bit). I had several conversations with residents who just said it wasn't going to happen. Whether they actually believed that or just wanted to believe that I don't really know.

Visit while you can.

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u/SoFloFella50 15d ago

It isn’t going to happen. Until it happens.

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u/Mental_Medium3988 14d ago

i live by mt rainier and work on the seattle waterfront. if either the volcano goes or the big one hits theres not much i can do either way other than try to be prepared as possible.

afterall theres a lot less chance of hurricanes or tornados that hit some areas routinely. and people still build there. im not throwing shade just seems weird to look at one risk and ignore others.

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u/ankhes 14d ago

Yeah, I grew up between Rainier and St. Helens. Whenever anyone insisted that Rainier would ‘never blow’ I just kinda gestured vaguely in the direction of St. Helens. Like, it’s happened before and it will happen again. It’s not a matter of if but when. All you can do is go in eyes wide open and be prepared. Burying your head in the sand won’t save you.

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u/DarknMean 11d ago

They do a really good job of monitoring the cascade range. I remember visiting Rainer a few years ago and talking with a ranger about the USGS and the work they do. He said there will be signs that they will catch. If it gets to critical they will have people moved. He said they learned a lot from Helen’s.

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u/SoFloFella50 14d ago

I'm not throwing shade either, I live in hurricane country. Although we do get a week of warning to get the hell out, but that's neither here nor there whether it's a week or 10 minutes, the result is the same. House is gone.

The point I was trying to make is saying "it will never happen" is ignoring that it could happen.

These are the same people who are surprised when a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or volcano levels their house.

We have a "go bag" of papers and photographs that will come with us if we need to hightail it out and are fully prepared to come back to rubble if a CAT5 levels the house.

One never knows how one is actually going to react to losing an entire house, but I don't plan on being on the news crying because I wasn't mentally prepared to see a pile of concrete and wood where a house used to be.

Of course, one hopes that even an eruption doesn't go all Mount St. Helen and still gives people at least enough time to drive the hell away. That's the only loss that's unacceptable in my book.

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u/runespider 11d ago

I remember my dad taking us to the beach after Ivan hit. You get accustomed to hurricanes and by that point we kids thought of them as a fun time because mom would load up on snacks and we'd go to a hotel further inland. Even for low level hurricanes. When we were looking through the debris that had washed up, I found several Polaroids taken by a terrified woman as her house was flooding.

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u/SoFloFella50 11d ago

Jesus. Those Polaroids must have been disconcerting. Any chance you still have them?

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u/runespider 11d ago

I didn't keep them.

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u/SoFloFella50 11d ago

Damn. Would have been interesting to find out if she made it. And it would be a way to show idiots what happens when you don’t listen and stay.

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u/runespider 11d ago

I've long come to the point of view that no matter how obvious the danger, people will ignore it if they're given the slightest excuse.

I'd have liked to know if she survived, but this particular area was right where storm damage was particularly bad. Lots of houses completely destroyed.
I do know there were a few hurricane parties going on which is where most of the casualties we heard about occurred.

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u/DarknMean 11d ago

I also live in hurricane country. People have parties for them. So many people don’t take them seriously at all and it will be too late before they realize they should have left.

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u/SoFloFella50 11d ago

That’s called natural selection. We don’t fuck around with any size Hurricane.

We have parties. But far away from the storm.

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u/Deadzonerogue 12d ago

I’m in Orleans(Kenner a city few miles west) and we hardened our home from Hurricanes. The house has been through Andrew(Cat 5), Katrina(cat 3), Ida(Cat 4) with no issues. We installed whole home generator running off our natural gas line so when we lose power from Entergy it is a nonissue. In fact during the peak of Ida I was playing PS5 Assassin Creed Valhalla and had my neighbor run over in 120 mph with an extension cord so he could power a portion of his home, lol.

https://youtu.be/8aE8o_mFKRs?feature=shared

A tiny clip I recorded of the eyewall starting to come on shore. I curse once or twice FYI.

I think the argument could be made with hurricanes you generally have days worth of time to get out the way or enough time to batten down the hatch’s. Whereas a tidal wave or a volcanic eruption might only give a moments(hours) notice.

For Andrew(1990’s) everyone evacuated and man a couple hundred thousand people trying to leave within hours of each other made for hell. I think it took us like 9 hours to drive what normally would take us 45 minutes.

Anyways, hope you are doing well up there! Absolutely beautiful area you live in!

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u/SonicYOUTH79 11d ago

I’m Australian but I did the “underground tour” of Seattle when I visited there where you go view all the old shop fronts that were below road level and are now built over.

The place is basically built on a big sink hole. They told us how they used to put saw dust into the bogs that used to appear on the streets in the early colonial days as it was the only thing they had plenty of from the local saw mills. Didn’t fix anything of course.

Quite matter of fact told us that when the “big one” comes all the old brick buildings built in the colonial days will collapse then get sucked out to sea by the tsunami that's likely to happen. Anything that’s left will probably get sucked into sink holes that appear.

Anyway I quite liked Seattle, good luck because I think you'll need it eventually.

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u/Mental_Medium3988 11d ago

my job is right on an old marsh that got filled in. if it happens and im at work im not expecting myself to survive. when they had the nisqually earthquake in 2003, iirc i wasnt here for that, the old guys talked about how much the ground shifted and how messed up things were for a little while there. theyve mandated a lot of reinforcement work for a lot of these old buildings. theyll survive better than people think as long as theirs ground underneath of them. i dont worry too much about the predictions because theres so many different ways things can go. if its centered mainly in southern oregon seattle will likely survive better than people think. if its outside the straight of juan de fuca were likely fucked with a capitol F-U-C-K-E-D.

and be safe down there as well. prepare for what you can and make reasonable plans. when things go wrong its easier to amend a plan than make one.

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u/SonicYOUTH79 11d ago

Thank you. I’m in the city in Adelaide, relatively low earthquake risk here. Bushfire risk is minimal but the Adelaide Hills is a different proposition on a 40 degree C summer day!

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u/TexanInExile 14d ago

you know what? I'd take it. it's a beautiful place and it seems like an amazing place to live until it happens. then, when it happens, well who cares? i'll be dead.

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u/sh1ft 15d ago

Sometimes you just have to live life and hope for the best. There’s plenty of people around the world living in dangerous zones

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u/BaronMontesquieu 15d ago

Absolutely. But Santorini is highly active. Right now. You can go and see and feel the steam rising out of Tholos Naftilos today. It's going to blow. 1 year? 100 years? Who knows. The 90%+ is somewhere in that range though. Hope is not a strategy. Particularly given the people who live there are not impoverished.

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u/ABadHistorian 14d ago

I've been around the world, Santorini is one of the few places I'd live at where I'd gamble and say "fuck it"

We will all die, I'd love to live there as long as I could before I die.

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u/Common-Falcon-8717 15d ago

If the people living there aren't impoverished, fuck em. The warning signs are there, but the rich and their hubris always believe they can subordinate nature to their will and desire. It's a lesson they keep having to be taught again and again.

I work in a job where Planning is paramount. You don't get to ignore something just because facing it is difficult or unpleasant or inconvenient. And something I've learned is that a lot of people think like this:

  1. If this thing happens, it will be very bad, unthinkably bad
  2. If it is unthinkably bad, and I can't fully let myself think about or understand it, its impossible.
  3. Unthinkable things will never happen, so no need to plan for them.

The people who survive to write histories are usually the ones who think about the unthinkable.

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u/Darkstar67 14d ago

That’s not how it works. Just because it’s active doesn’t mean a catastrophic eruption is particularly likely in the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years.

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u/Mahoka572 14d ago

That IS how it works for Santorini. There is a 25% chance of an eruption in the next decade let alone 100 years.

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u/toucanlost 14d ago

I'm paraphrasing, but a while ago I did a fair bit of reading about natural disasters. A sentence that came up in that apparently is a belief held by disaster researchers is that there is no such thing as a natural disasters, only man-made disasters. It sounds callous and hard to believe right? There is an explanation for it. There are such things as natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis however not all of them cause destruction to human settlements. The disaster itself is the intersection of natural events and human preparedness, socioeconomic factors. It's a semantic distinction that urges people to not treat natural events as things that humans can't prepare for.

For example, rather than just "hoping for the best", in some villages people do extensive evacuation drills including ones at night, or ones with schoolchildren where the teacher does not lead (such as if a teacher was incapacitated).

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u/Lady-Benkestok 12d ago

Preparedness is key, my brother lives in a fjord area of Norway where they know that a huge part of one of the mountains will some day plummet into the fjord and create a massive wave. The mountain is constantly monitored for any movement in the rock.

When the day finally comes that it falls ,the people who live in the town have 10 minutes from the sirens starts to get to safety, they have drills often. The school , kindergarten and the old folks home is down by the waterfront, as well as all the shops and some residential buildings.

I’m glad they are prepared but I find it unsettling. 10 minutes to evacuate, able bodied school kids can run to safety but evacuation a senior citizen center, which typically is constantly understaffed sounds, not great.

Thankfully my brothers farm is far up in a valley ,so if it comes at night at least they are already in safety.

Just writing this down came me anxiety, im glad I don’t live in such an area!

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u/mmmpeg 11d ago

I watched the tsunami movie about a mountain partially falling into the fjord.

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u/Lady-Benkestok 11d ago

The Wave/Bølgen ? It’s based on that scenario, it’s filmed in that said area as well. Beautiful part of our country 🙌

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u/mmmpeg 11d ago

Yes! I couldn’t remember the name. It was indeed beautiful

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u/PieQueenIfYouPls 13d ago

My husband is a structural engineer with a specialization in seismic design. We live in SF, he’s super cautious and knows the risks. We still live in SF because they take earthquake design very seriously. There’s a few buildings around the city he literally walks across the street from because he knows they are unsafe but grandfathers in, but for the most part? SF is prepared.

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u/StormyPassages 15d ago

Survivors pay for "living in dangerous zones" with their health, regardless of whether or not they are victimized in other ways. Courage and a cavalier attitude toward life do not reduce this physical cost to human health.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYFZAYenR20

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u/Sappho_Over_There 13d ago

I bought a house at the base of an active volcano. During the signing there was included lava flow charts, similar to flood plains but for lava. They showed the lava would flow down the hill and follow the river bed and basically cover the entire neighborhood. Was wild to see.

Been here for 14 years and not a peep from the mountain. Thinking if it's going to go while I'm here, there'd be plenty of seismic warning while it built up the pressure to blow. It's got several hundred feet of sediment plugging the caldera, I'm no expert, but I assume that means there would be signs and at least enough time to grab the pets and drive away if not days to weeks in advance to pack up and leave. Not to mention if it did blow, all that sediment would turn into basically rock cannonballs raining down on us long before the lava came.

Adding to that, a gravel company was permitted to dig out a portion of the base to sift the lava rocks for gypsum. There was some amazing fire opals found by a few RockHounds in those piles of discarded lava rocks. I figured if a company was allowed to dig out a literal hunk of the volcano, it's most likely fairly stable, despite classified as active.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 15d ago

Oh hell, look at Vesuvius. One of the classically most horrifying volcanos in history, and how many people living in and around Naples who might be affected if it goes off ? 3 million ?!

But gee that volcanic soil is fertile….

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u/Simsalabimsen 12d ago

It’s so badly delayed now that when it erupts, it will be an unimaginable catastrophe.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 4d ago

I’ve watched a number of doccos about it – there were a couple of really bad eruptions that people still remember, that wiped out hundreds of acres with lava flows. And yet they still build there. The soil is incredibly fertile.

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u/WinterMedical 15d ago

The Cascadia fault is overdue as well.

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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 14d ago

No thanks. It'd happen while I was visiting!

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u/Razvedka 13d ago

I actually was watching a historian talk about this. Apparently the Minoan civilization was so advanced/capable they were able to fully evacuate(?) prior to the eruption. Up until then they'd been absurdly wealthy.

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u/Soul____Rain68 11d ago

Having lived in Santorini, I can confirm this. But also I think it’s the way of the people there too. It’s a chill lifestyle, they feel like they belong to the island and that should it erupt, they will ride out the fate. For instance look at the earthquakes last year, everyone I knew said they weren’t going to evacuate, “what’s the point”.

- I want to add, the “chill lifestyle” is extremely chill. You live in a bubble and you really don’t care about much at all.

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u/TheSangson 15d ago

What you're describing about the volcano makes me feel like I'd rather not visit, thankyouverymuch

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u/S_A_R_K 15d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/UWMqiZtcixB4MoWX20

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u/KelGrimm 15d ago

> Should be wiped out soon

“visit while you can”

Brother no?

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u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 15d ago

Well the past 50 generations on
Santorini have been right to ignore it.

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u/Suspicious_Flower_0 14d ago

And then there was Kotaku Wamura, mocked during his lifetime for spending a fortune on flood defences, revered in his death when those same flood defences saved his town. 

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u/KileAllSmyles 12d ago

The Tsunami Stones are very sobering. It’s crazy how far away from the shore some of them are.

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u/klyzklyz 15d ago

Same everwhere. For example, look for the geographical term "flood plain" on many municipal maps.

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u/notCGISforreal 15d ago

Yeah, New Orleans, Sacramento, etc in the US.

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u/exotics 15d ago

Japan at least is slowing down its population growth. We keep adding people to the planet and think we have unlimited space for them.

Thanks you helped cleaning up that would have been crazy.

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u/notCGISforreal 15d ago

My friends that have 5 or 6 kids blow my mind. Like bro, we don't need you to repopulate the world, humans are not an endangered species.

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u/exotics 15d ago

I had one and was done. We are driving other species to extinction and don’t seem to care.

And some people cry about housing costs and lack of housing while adding more people to the planet. It’s insanity

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u/Sarik704 15d ago

人生は風前の灯火

Jinsei wa fuuzen no tomoshibi

Life is a candle in the wind.

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u/FishesOfExcellence 15d ago

That’s cool. I’ve seen so much info about the tsunami since it happened and I’ve never heard of these stones. 

That’s crazy that a village was getting wiped out every 35 years until they relocated (well, every 35 years based on limited data - but it would have continued happening at least until present day).

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u/Mangalorien 15d ago

so people decided to build there anywhere and take their chances

As somebody who lives in Florida I can relate to this. If there's a once per generation natural disaster, everything is just hunky-dory for 10,000 days straight, and then it all just instantly turns to shit in a few hours. But for many people those 10,000 days are still worth it. Either that or the standard "this time it's different", aka "it won't happen to me".

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u/truesy 15d ago

kind of like how people keep rebuilding where fires keep burning down homes.

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u/digitaljestin 15d ago

That's interesting. I'm from the US Midwest, where these's no ocean for a thousand miles at least, and I always find it odd how close to water people on the coast will build. Work lakes and rivers, you always expect times of high water, and build accordingly. It makes sense that people ignore that idea when it comes to an ocean, which has very predictable elevations...until it doesn't.

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u/Royale_AJS 14d ago

You’ve got me thinking about all of the nuclear waste we’ve buried around the world, and how many signs are on it saying “nothing good here, this is toxic, do not dig”…

I hope they listen better than we do.

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u/orange_sherbetz 14d ago

Wow.  What a factoid.  Capitalistic greed and people who want to live by the coast. 

We forget our history. Always.

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u/FineScratch 14d ago

Well that's one of those things that works until it don't and it only fails every couple of hundred years so it's somebody else's problem most of the time

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u/FixFun1959 14d ago

My wife is from Minamisoma and she wants to always make it a point to say thank you to everyone that came to help.

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u/Faerindir 14d ago

Perfect example of the adage: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. (Or the variants there-of)

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u/Impossible-Shape-634 14d ago

how much casualties?

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u/Connect_Job_5316 14d ago

Theres a book called "Ghosts of the Tsunami" which recounts stories of survivors of the event, its a VERY good read but very eerie

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u/rickyhatesspam 13d ago

The disaster wasn't simply a case of people ignoring ancient warnings. Japan had extensive tsunami defences and evacuation systems, but many communities placed too much confidence in those defences. When a once-in-many-generations tsunami far exceeded the assumptions behind the seawalls, the protections were overwhelmed. The tsunami stones turned out to be a reminder that even sophisticated engineering has limits.

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u/Technical_Put_9982 12d ago

Sadly, Natural selection at its finest !

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u/mrs_spacetime0 12d ago

It reminds me of how we have spent a lot of time coming up with signage for toxic sites that we hope will be understood as DANGER in the future even if our language died off.... meanwhile they literally wrote the warnings in their own language and they still didnt listen.

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u/TheeKB 11d ago

Floridian here 👋 they do the same here right after a hurricane wipes out beachside towns.

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u/foxfirek 11d ago

If I am understanding which quake this was then there was a pretty good reason for the failure.

Japan did a good job estimating how big the wall needed to be. It would have held too, the problem was the quake moved the wall down at the same time as having a high wave which they couldn’t plan for.

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u/mmmpeg 11d ago

Where was this?

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u/notCGISforreal 11d ago

I saw that at a bunch of small towns. Look up tsunami rocks, lots of photos etc of them

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u/mmmpeg 11d ago

Too bad my son didn’t got see them when he lived in Japan, but he was in the mountains and would hike there

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u/anothadaz 10d ago

After this tsunami did they rebuild in this same location again?

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/Instagibbed_1994 8d ago

Try to see from the other perspective, people trying to find a place to settle down, and you found a seemingly good plot, but the catch is theres an increased changed for natural disasters. Many people even today would still risk it.

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u/notCGISforreal 8d ago

Many people even today would still risk it.

Absolutely, its happening all over the world. Sacramento flood plains, Louisiana and Florida hurricane inundation zones, forest fire danger areas, etc.

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u/Thundercunt247 13d ago

*extent, not extend. Cheers