国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

Asia-Pacific

How one Japanese village defied the tsunami

(Agencies)
Updated: 2011-05-13 14:50
Large Medium Small

FUDAI, Japan -?In the rubble of Japan's northeast coast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet.

Related readings:
How one Japanese village defied the tsunamiShaken Japan latches onto earthquake warning app 
How one Japanese village defied the tsunamiJapan lifts tsunami warning after M7.4 earthquake 
How one Japanese village defied the tsunamiAfter earthquake, before graduation

Fudai is the village that survived?- thanks to a huge wall once deemed a mayor's expensive folly and now vindicated as the community's salvation.

The 3,000 residents living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader, Kotaku Wamura,?who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one.

His 51-foot (15.5-meter) floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and meant spending more than $30 million in today's dollars.

"It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared," said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business has been ruined but who is happy to have his family and home intact.

The gate project was criticized as wasteful in the 1970s. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community's adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns. Two months after the disaster, more than 25,000 are missing or dead.

"However you look at it, the effectiveness of the floodgate and seawall was truly impressive," current Fudai Mayor Hiroshi Fukawatari said.

Towns to the north and south also braced against tsunamis with concrete seawalls, breakwaters and other protective structures. But none were as tall as Fudai's.

The town of Taro believed it had the ultimate fort?- a double-layered 33-foot-tall (10-meter-tall) seawall spanning 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) across a bay. It proved no match for the March 11 tsunami.

In Fudai, the waves rose as high as 66 feet (20 meters), as water marks show on the floodgate's towers. So some ocean water did flow over but caused minimal damage. The gate broke the tsunami's main thrust. The two mountainsides flanking the gate also offered a natural barrier.

分享按鈕
石河子市| 钦州市| 陆良县| 拉孜县| 蒲江县| 祁阳县| 盐亭县| 铅山县| 黄山市| 明光市| 抚宁县| 井研县| 齐齐哈尔市| 湛江市| 钦州市| 讷河市| 崇州市| 盘山县| 崇信县| 淮北市| 宁陕县| 桦甸市| 西乡县| 崇明县| 潮州市| 新巴尔虎右旗| 正镶白旗| 榆中县| 和平区| 宁津县| 子洲县| 合肥市| 茂名市| 岗巴县| 桃园市| 彭泽县| 高州市| 天水市| 武夷山市| 江油市| 定结县|