Dirty Work in Progress

Digging mud from ditches and pouring it into sandbags and carrying them to dump sites is pretty messy. And standing at the bottom of debris-filled canals passing up buckets of slop is equally so. And low crawling clad in underwear under the floorboards of a house with only two feet clearance to scrape out tsunami mud isn't pleasant either. These are some of the things that All Hands crew volunteer for every day.

Even trying to clean an entire city block's sidewalks using only a 7-inch broom (proper push brooms don't seem to be available here) is pretty daunting and dusty.

Jo-Ann details a sidewalk with a mini-broom

But perhaps the pinnacle of nastiness arose in two recent projects that came our way. The city of Ofunato has a couple stinky problems on their hands. All Hands is trying to build credibility with the city by accepting some tough tasks, hoping to get more work for the volunteers later.

One of the odorous projects is a seaweed processing factory that remains full of packaged seaweed that needs to be disposed of. It has become a public health menace and nobody wants to deal with it. The work involves opening the packages of seaweed and carrying them outside where they can be scooped up my machine and disposed of. There are tons of the stuff. Several volunteers embraced this project willingly.

Lance relaxes in a pile of seaweed

The most disgusting task of all began yesterday. There is a fish processing factory that hasn't been cleaned out by its owners and there remain tons and tons of packaged fish that's been sitting there for three months. Three months-- imagine! Anyway, the environmental regulations prohibit dunping the packaging into the ocean. So the plastic wrappers need to be opened and all the plastic and cardboard removed (by hand) so the fish can be given a decent burial at sea.

The city has a hard time finding people to do this task. They even offered All Hands money to do it. But, of course, we offered to do it for free in order to curry favor. Once again, All Hands volunteers stepped into the breach. Donning hazmat suits and respirators, the volunteers spent the day at the cannery.

I happened to be on the bus delivering the boxed lunches to the cannery crew. OMG- what a stench! I carried the lunches in and didn't touch anything. I can't believe they could stomach a lunch after such work. And when they came back to base, our crew ended up on the same bus. One volunteer got off and walked home. I had my head out the window the whole way and it wasn't nearly effective. Even after a double treatment with Febreze, the bus reeked afterward. And the fish volunteers had to sit in the back at the nightly meeting.

There remain five more days before the fish project is completed. The buses and base will, I fear, be permanently affected. Sushi sales are expected to decline radically.

Lunch time at the Cannery

Chris rides the fish bus- no one sitting next to him

Satoshi and Mike prepare for lunch

Headed Home

Tonight, June 14, we take the overnight bus that leaves right from Ofunato and takes us directly to Ikebukuro station in Tokyo. Our friend Junji will meet us there and we will spend the day at his house and then head for a hotel in Tokyo.

It is hard to believe that our time in Ofunato is done.

Nap Time

The work is exhausting, so when it's break time we all take a siesta. If the weather is good, that may be on a sidewalk. If it's rainy, we often find an abandoned building to hang out in.

Dinner time at Base

Note to Tomasso's Family:

He is acting very calm as long as we can get him to take his medications. The incident about dancing naked on the table at the sushi restaurant has been successfully hushed up. We are sending him to Tokyo for a short rest.

Ditches again

There is little work available helping families with their houses, so digging out drainage gutters is pretty much our destiny for the rest of the trip. There are hundreds of kilometers of gutters to do and we complete a few hundred feet a day.

In the morning it was raining and the ditches had water in them, making for lots of messy mud. The current work is along a major thoroughfare, so we have to wear safety vests.

Ditching in the Rain

Rather than dump the dirt and mud in piles, the city wants us to put in in bags. So we laboriously transfer the contents of the wheelbarrows into giant bags that hold probably a half ton. Once these are even partly full, there's no moving them by hand.

Mike Works the Bags

We're still working near the house of the three elderly sisters who offered us coffee. They say they love company and insist on catering our two coffee breaks each day. Since their house is in the middle of a commercial area and the few nearby houses have been demolished or abandoned, they don't have any neighbors. To go with the coffee, they made us some mochi dumplings filled with special brown sugar and miso. They're really very pleased to be able to assist the volunteer effort. Today, we'll take along a balsam fir pillow from Maine to give them as a gift.

Homemade Treats

Behind their house is a hillside maybe 60 feet high. It's so steep we would have trouble climbing it ourselves without a pickaxe. When the earthquake happened, the city's tsunami-warning sirens went off (they're everywhere), the sisters got out of the house and climbed the hillside with a little boost from some neighbors. We can't figure how they did it. Their house did end up with three feet of water inside, but they've since replaced all the tatami mats and paper screen doors and cleaned out the mud and the place looks almost untouched.

The Sisters' House

Tiree in Front of the Famous Hillside

Just down the street, we watched crews taking down a couple stores and houses using big machines. (Sure could use some of these in Haiti!) An older couple were sitting on the sidewalk watching the process. They told us one of the houses had been in their family for five generations. The house didn't look too badly damaged (flooding only) but we guess the land will now be used as parking lot for the surrounding big-box stores. It took only an hour for the grapple machine to reduce a house to a pile of broken lumber. The owners wandered the rubble pile for a while after the machine left.

Click here for video

In other news.....

Brett and company have been camping out most nights without a tent. Unfazed by the heavy workday, they start out at 8:00 or 9:00 pm and make a two hour climb up the nearby mountain to camp and wake up to the sunrise. We hear they've built a little shelter up there using local materials. They're always back in time for the morning bus. We'd love to do this, but not on a school night!

Happy Campers

Extraordinary Hospitality

The hospitality in Ofunato is exceptional. The people are very grateful that volunteers would come all the way from Tokyo or London or New York just to help out.

And we have no worries about losing stuff that we leave laying about. For example, we leave our wheelbarrows and tools outside next to the community center at night. The standing joke among the volunteers is that not only does nothing go missing but you're liable to find extra tools in the morning. And a case of beer along with them.

The other day, we were working in the countryside and sat in the shade near a house to take our break. The house had been flooded and damaged and we didn't know anyone was living there. The lady of the house came out to meet us. She then left and returned with a variety of cold drinks and some snacks. The day before that, a local lady who had lost her home led some of us on a trip to a museum in the nearby hills. Not only did we get free admission but the staff provided drinks and even brought each of us a gift.

At the museum

Yesterday we were digging out the ditches along one of the main roads. A trio of elderly sisters, all in their eighties, who lived in one of the houses invited all fourteen of us to coffee after we finished. It was good.


Last night, we needed badly to do laundry. Patrick, one of the other volunteers, knew of a laundromat in town where we could do it. He led us there after our nightly meeting and we found that it was closed. A passerby saw us there and ran to get the proprietor who then hustled to open the place up just for us. The place was two rooms with several machines and a tea table with some chairs. The machines were not coin-operated.

We couldn't figure how to use the machines, so Patrick wandered across the street and asked some neighbors how to work them. Several ladies came to our aid and got the laundry started. They then sat us down at the table and ran to get hot tea and coffee and several rounds of treats. They also brought a gift for Jo-Ann.

Then two of the ladies stayed around and did the laundry for us. No charge for anything, of course.

As we were leaving, they were surprised to learn we were going to walk the two miles up the hill to the Fukushinosato Center and offered to take us by car, which we declined. A minute after we left, they came running up to us on the street and gave us couple boxes of laundry detergent.

If this keeps up, we may not want to come home again.

Peninsula Work

We went out to a peninsula between Ofunato and Rikuzentakata to do debris cleanup. The house we worked on was only flooded, not otherwise damaged. The isthmus between the mainland and the peninsula, however, was totally wiped out. We also cleaned up the debris from one of their nearby rice fields.

We have a photo of the area taken from a nearby mountain on the mainland:



There was lots of debris including some heavy logs. Luckily, the farmer had a motorized carryall that we were able to use. It was inundated in the tsunami but still works.


Here is a panorama of the isthmus taken from the mountain the day before:

Click here for video on YouTube.

Demolition

While cleaning up rubble at the aforementioned print shop, we had to demolish a garden shed that had landed there. We removed all the roofing tiles and carried them away. Then Brett used a crowbar to remove much of the wood and finally a Sawz-All to cut away the supports. We used some props to hold it up, then pulled them away to drop the shed roof.

We used to do this stuff on a much bigger scale in Sumatra and Haiti. But it turns out that this was the first official All Hands demolition in Ofunato, so here is the historic video:

Click here for Video on YouTube

More Downtown Ofunato

We worked a second day to complete our debris-removal job near the downtown. The back yard of a print shop had become home to lots of debris from the shop and elsewhere. The owner lost his house lower down in the town along with his car and boat. All his family are safe though.

After finishing the debris job we hiked back up to the area where our canal crew were working and gave them a hand dredging the canals.

Sidewalk plaque commemorating the May 1960
tsunami that followed the big Chile earthquake

Partially cleared debris behind the print shop

Shinpei and Stefan doing the final cleanup

Showing the completed job to the owner

Heading to the canals

Flowers have grown in the debris since the tsunami

Car floated into a house

Small hill near work site-- designated tsunami
escape area. Note the blue sign at bottom.

A couple young ladies in a car drove by and inquired what we were doing in the canals. A while later they drove back and handed us several shopping bags full of cold drinks and snacks. So
kind.

Canal crew enjoying treats

Downtown Ofunato

We moved further south toward the center of the city and the mouth of the bay to work yesterday. Working all week on the canals and ditches in a considerably cleaned up section of town, we've had a false impression of the progress made.

Our new work location is in an area that hasn't been cleaned up as much. Many destroyed buildings haven't been demolished, and cars and other debris are piled everywhere. There are numerous signs of the tsunami's power.

Waiting for the crew bus

On the way to work site

Downtown Ofunato

Our assignment was to clear the rubble in an area behind a house and to demolish a large garden shed that had been deposited there by the waves. The house contained a print shop, so much of the rubble was paper.

Demolishing a shed

Reinforced cement utility pole snapped like a chopstick

Tossing rubble

There was a house nearby that had been ripped from its foundation and tossed on its side. Totally intact, with curtains still hanging, it shows how strong are the earthquake-resistant construction techniques used here. Nothing stops a tsunami though. The next three pics are of that house:






The house we were working at was on a small hill now surrounded by a landscape of destruction. Above the water line, everything is as it was before and life goes on. For those whose property was partially flooded, the cleanup continues.

Just beyond the destruction a barber shop is open for business and a functioning Coke machine stands in front.

Floating rubble was deposited on the roof of this building which stands next to the tsunami warning sirens

This house was deposited here from its original location across the street to the right and behind the photographer

With Habitat in the Trenches

Habitat for Humanity has an active chapter in Japan. They take trips to other countries in the region to help build homes. One of the reasons we work weekends and take Tuesdays as our day off is to allow them to partner with us on weekends.

Yesterday they sent 22 volunteers from the Tokyo area to work with us. They spent all night on a hired bus to get here. The generous administration at the Fukushinosato Center loaned us an extra room for the Habitat volunteers to sleep in.


Half the Habitat team headed to nearby Rikuzentakata to help clear debris fromrice fields. The other half came with us to the destroyed downtown area to help clear the canals and ditches. This is way different than their usual work, but they held up well in the trenches.


The kind folks at the neighborhood Community Center let us use their facility for lunch (and a nap) again. I presented them with some genuine maple sugar to taste and explained how it is made.

Near the block we were working on (totally wiped clear of buildings) there is a small promontory with a few houses on it. You can see in the picture that the tsunami reached halfway up the hill. It must have been quite frightening to see the waters raging up the hill and not know where they would stop. A local resident told me that 30 people were lost on the single block that we are working.

Railroad tracks bent by tsunami