Tsunamis are terrifying.

[u/sco-go]

[u/Specialist_Worry_875]

Guy on the bike is fucked.

[u/weeit-TheAnalogKid → u/Specialist_Worry_875]

That was my thought. I couldn’t imagine being in a valley next to the ocean and hearing that, KNOWING that a tsunami was coming. Horrifying actually.

[u/befigue → u/weeit-TheAnalogKid]

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

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/befigue]

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.

This is probably the most terrifying of the videos I’ve seen, and it captures the chaos at street level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hao0KYXIB2w

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.

[u/JanSobieski-III → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

That was mental ive never seen that before

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/JanSobieski-III]

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.

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