In a single act of kindness, a Japanese woman offers food and drink to geologists researching the 2011 Tohoku tsunami.
“You look tired,” she tells the group as she hands out refreshments.
Among them is Australia’s Dr Catherine Chague-Goff. The geochemist has been invited by Japan to research the tsunami deposits – gathering core samples which she will bring back to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at Heathcote for analysis.
On her return visit to Japan, Chague-Goff knocked on the woman’s front door offering gifts from Australia to thank her for her earlier kindness in the face of such tragic circumstances.
There are many lessons to be learned from the tsunami. Lessons of humility and humanity. But Chague-Goff and a team of Japanese researchers are in the Sendai area to find out what the tsunami can teach us scientifically – what lessons can be learned about how we can best be prepared the next time the earth shudders at a magnitude 9.1, releasing a mega tsunami on to highly populated coastal cities and towns.
“If I can save one life, it will be worth it,” says Chague-Goff, who has been to the site four times in the past two years. She was there in March, the second anniversary of the catastrophic event and she plans to return in October to take more core samples of the earth. Using an ITRAX core scanner back in Australia, she will then examine the chemical components of the soil deposits.
As she works in the field, Chague-Goff tries to block out the devastating human loss and sets her mind to the task at hand.
But it’s difficult. Like the rest of the world, she has seen the footage of the massive waves. Seen the black, muddy water come crashing down on the buildings, wiping out whole towns and killing 19,000 residents – 3 per cent of the population. Flowers are scattered over Sendai – the nearest major city to the epicentre of the earthquake.
It took nature six minutes to destroy the area, and two years for teams of humans to clear up. In that time, Chague-Goff has seen the excavators clean the site of twisted metal and rubble to make way for new crops and construction. But the soil is too salty to grow rice again and farmers have had to diversify. Life here will never be the same.
As Chague-Goff walks through the area, she recognises the landmarks she has seen on the television and on YouTube clips – the airport, particularly, causes her some distress. Also, an evacuation zone sign where people were supposed to gather in the event of a tsunami, that was positioned, she says, far too close to the coast and was flattened by the force of the waves.
Japan, she explains, is the most prepared country in the world but still it was not ready for a tsunami of this size.
“I don’t want to lay blame,” Chague-Goff says. “I wouldn’t want to say they were wrong, because, you know, hindsight is a wonderful thing.”
Chague-Goff is a wetlands and tsunami expert. In 1995, with her husband Professor James Goff, she discovered the first evidence of a palaeo-tsunami in the Abel Tasman National Park in the South Island of New Zealand. Over the next 15 years, the pair uncovered 330 lines of evidence covering 30 events stretching back 8000 years.
2012. Fairfax Media