Google releases images of Japan's nuclear ghost town
Street View camera visits two years after earthquake, tsunami
It has become our generation’s duty to make sure future generations understand the city’s history and culture.
TAMOTSU BABA
MAYOR OF NAMIE
SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.
Google, operator of the world’s biggest web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town’s mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360- degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an email.
All of Namie’s 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear plant, about eight kilometres from the town, the world’s worst nuclear accident after Chornobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, Calif.based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post.
“Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities,” Baba said. “It has become our generation’s duty to make sure future generations understand the city’s history and culture.”
Three reactors melted down at the Dai- Ichi plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power, after the earthquake and tsunami. About 160,000 people were forced to evacuate and a 20- kilometre no- go zone was set up because of radiation fallout.
Street View images show a city frozen in time with abandoned cars and Coca- Cola Co. vending machines still full of drinks. At the “Friend Shop” near Highway 6, weeds were growing in the parking lot and the windows still had clothing hanging on display.
By providing a memento of the past, the images can facilitate residents’ healing, said Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s obviously a way to record the quality of life that existed in that place and to recognize the special quality of each person’s home and each property,” she said. “If they make a choice to recreate somewhere else, they have a kind of archaeological record of what they had before.”
Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Google used its Street View technology to assist in the recovery effort. Relief workers used OpenStreetMap to provide aid to survivors of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, said Mike Dobson, president of TeleMapics LLC, a consulting firm, and former chief cartographer at Rand McNally.
“Humans are used to looking outward and upwards — and that’s what street view does so well; it mimics the way we see things,” Dobson said. “People’s desire to know how to get between places is a compelling urge. This expands the horizon.”
Street View’s images also serve as a reminder of the risks of growth in a region susceptible to tsunamis, said Dana Buntrock, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and is affiliated with the school’s Center for Japanese Studies.
“Right after the earthquake, people recalled that in much earlier periods there were often stone monuments put up in the locations where the tsunami had reached, and people said, ‘ Wow, we really allowed ourselves to forget,’” Buntrock said. “The entire coast along there has been built up in ways that created vulnerabilities.”