Rikuzentakata, again

We needed to go meet with a city hall official in Rikuzentakata today.  We went to City Hall, or rather, the temporary City Hall which is essentially four long trailers made into offices.  The original City Hall is damaged beyond repair.

As we were driving back towards our current base in Ofunato, we drove through what remains of Rikuzentakata.  Again.  I looked out the window to my left and sat it:  Kenritsu Rikuzentakata Byoin.  The main hospital in Rikuzentakata.  It's a four-story structure, white on the outside, rectangular.  It looks like a typical hospital.  There's nothing special about this hospital except that all the windows on the first three floors are blown out.  This is the hospital where the doctors, nurses and able-bodied people ran up to the roof to escape the tsunami.  They had to leave behind those who couldn't escape in order to save themselves.  They heard those die as they fled up to the fourth floor and onto the roof. 

I can only imagine what they must have seen from the roof.  It couldn't have been that far to the rising water below.  Fear and guilt are two potent emotions to combine.  Seeing the building I had read and heard so much about brought it back all over again.  This sucks.

There are two other apartment buildings that I look at every time we go to Rikuzentakata.  These two five-story apartment buildings stand one in front of the other, the first one being closer to the ocean. All of the windows on both buildings are blown out for first four floors.  I can see through the first building to the second one behind.  This means the wave was four stories high and powerful enough to blow through windows, a hall way, another apartment on the other side of the hall way, then go into another building and wreak the same damage all over again.

It's a quiet hell.  There's no fire, burning bodies, pain, blood, screaming and devil-like creatures as I've seen in artwork in museums and books.  This is an entirely different kind of hell.  It's quiet.  There's no one around.  It's mountains of rubble everywhere I look.  Pile after pile of cars, splintered wood, and everything you can imagine inside.

Then as I we're driving, I see it.  Someone put a statue of a Buddha on the side of the road.  This came from someone's home.  Artifacts dot the roadside here and there and I'm at a loss for words all over again.