Japan's worst nightmare

Don't play Play now More video Recommended Click to play video Rosetta Stone Sumatran tiger cubs finally named Click to play video Rhinos up, up and away! Click to play video Timelapse: storm clouds over Melbourne Click to play video Sydney braces for more storms Replay video Return to video Video settings Ground level view of tsunami This video was taken in Kesennuma city, Miyagi prefecture - one of the worst hit areas. Within two minutes the town is turned into a muddy stream. Video feedback Video settings THE people of Minamisanriku did not need the screaming sirens to tell them a tsunami would be coming, because nature had given its own warning with such force that it knocked them to the floor. After the ground had finished its two-minute-long seizure they scrambled to their feet, through the dust and screams, and instinctively fled for higher ground. But in a tightly packed town of 17,000 people, that was not as easy as it sounds. The Pacific plate had been pushing Japan up and to the west until the two plates ruptured on March 11 in a long offshore fault line, with a force more than a thousand times greater than the world's entire nuclear arsenal. Japan jumped nearly three metres to the east and a sea-floor area about one-third the size of Honshu island sprang up by an average of half a metre. The resulting wave was so broad it was barely perceptible when speeding through deep water. But when it caught the drag of the Japanese coast it slowed, gathered power and thrust itself into this bay with terrifying fury. After 30 minutes, the tsunami smashed into Rosetta Stone Language Minamisanriku as an angry mass of thick, black water. It swallowed the two and three-storey shopping district in the front half-dozen streets of town. It plucked up the library, the elementary school, the railway line and the town hall and deposited them god knows where. Seeming to gather strength from what it devoured, it dunked fishing trawlers under the town's main bridge, pushed others over it, then removed the obstacle altogether. It licked up trucks and houses and a long line of cars and terrified drivers who had jammed the only highway out of town. Advertisement: Story continues below "My home was over there," says Yoshiko Goto, pointing to what looks like the mud floor of a dried-up dam. She has come back in search of her brother, and his son. She makes a point of saying that they are "missing", which is not yet the same as dead. Perhaps a third of the population reached the sanctuary of the main evacuation hill, metres above sea level, from where they looked back with horror. The Pacific Ocean was pouring over their community as if a dam had burst. An amateur video from that vantage point shows the water, now milky brown, making easy work of the villas on the outer edge of town. It lifts them up and surfs them along like discarded chunks of styrofoam. Whole families who had taken refuge on their second-storey roofs only realised their terrible mistake when their houses began to move. The raging waters pushed up the banks of the tsunami evacuation area. And then even the most prudent and able-bodied had to turn around and run, again, because their tsunami safety area was no longer safe. "The water made it up to the first floor of both the evacuation areas, so even those who made it there were washed away," says Watabe Yoshi, who lost his house. "Only those on the second floors survived." On that Rosetta Stone Italian lookout more than metres above the now-still water of the bay below, you can see where dirty water has punched through windows and swept away less-sturdy rooms, leaving its deadly mark at head height around the walls. While the video footage and eye-witness accounts focus on the carnage, they are also dotted with acts of heroism. Several people can be seen running back to help friends and relatives escape from their houses and trying to beat the tsunami up the hill.