As Tsunami Approached, Town Officials “Held a Meeting”

There was massive tsunami wave breaker we can see it in the 2photo, all around the city, some where around 4 or 5meter high. I believe the people there thought it would be enough to stop the wave, and just went behind the wall, this is probably what i would have done.
The 50cm wide steel gate were torn apart and the wave went over the wall. There is apparently a lot of dead in otsuchi.

Hope my friends working at the city office made it safely but it is highly unlikely…

Even with safety measures in place and drills practiced you can’t evacuate that many people without some central organization. They can’t be blamed for incorrectly judging the magnitude of this freak event and I very much doubt they were sitting down for a three hour debate. Having a meeting might simply have involved letting the towns authority figures know exactly how bad the situation was. You want the mayor to hear the Tsunami alert and just run for the hills? No, he and the others had a responsibility to organize things and a building a kilometer from the shore would have seemed like a relatively safe distance to avoid major danger. A shame that their dedication to their jobs probably resulted in their deaths.

Try not to be so quick to accuse them of negligence. Unless some specific information suggests they were supposed to be doing something else, lets give them the benefit of the doubt. This tragedy doesn’t need any villains.

“At the time this blog entry was posted, the mayor and town officials were still missing. It is quite possible that their indecisiveness at a critical time resulted in their deaths, as well as the deaths of many town residents.”

James – that’s more than a bit harsh, considering they were one of the first places to get hit by the tsunami. They were very close to the epicentre.

Zoom in on that top image. There’s a clock in the middle of the building, over the door. Looks to me like about a quarter to three that they lost power. That’s when the quake hit.

If they lost power, they likely had no phones. And they wouldn’t have had much time. In that situation, I can’t see how calling an emergency meeting of department heads to get information out can be called indecisive.

90 minutes is a hell of a lot of time to find high ground, unless you live in Saskatchewan! Tsunami are well known phenomena, from bitter experience, here in Japan: so is asinine bureaucracy and indecisive superiors. If this is true the people who called the meeting do not deserve the honour of being buried with the townspeople.