Study Area

Rather than focusing on Japan as a whole and bogging down this project with too much information, we wanted to focus on one area in particular. After scanning the photographs taken for Google Earth during and in the days following, we determined that the best place to focus our efforts was on a port city known as Sōma, just over 45 kilometers north of the Fukushima Reactor that has become infamous.Prior to the earthquake, this was a rather averaged sized district with a population of almost 37 thousand. It was an area that was mainly focused on agriculture, but did have a number of factories and businesses operating near the port. This small town was so eye opening to us was due to the sheer and utter destruction that the 2011 tsunami caused.

This town of less that 200 square kilometers in sized was located directly at sea level, but unfortunately was only about 130 kilometers from the epicenter of this magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Because of this, the damage was catastrophic. Waves were reported to have traveled more than four kilometers inland and reached heights of up to ten kilometers. Due to the agrarian nature of this town, most of the land that was affected was flat, wide open farmland, leading to a heavy flooding of the areas nearest the coast. Many homes of the natives that lived here were also located more towards the coast, allowing for a much more pleasant living experience. Unfortunately for many of them however, this was not the case the day tsunami waves swept their homes away.