2 powerful earthquakes link nations in suffering

TOKYO – Mountains of rubble and twisted metal. Death on an unimaginable scale. Grief. Rage. Relief at having survived.

What’s left behind after a natural disaster so powerful that it rends the foundations of a society? What lingers over a decade later, even as the rest of the world moves on?

Similarities between the calamity unfolding this week in Turkey and Syria and the triple disaster that hit northern Japan in 2011 may offer a glimpse of what the region could face in the years ahead.

They’re linked by the sheer magnitude of the collective psychological trauma, of the loss of life and of the material destruction.

The combined toll of Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake rose past 20,000 deaths as authorities announced the discovery of new bodies Thursday. That has already eclipsed the more than 18,400 who died in the disaster in Japan.

That magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m., March 11, 2011. Not long after, cameras along the Japanese coast captured the wall of water that hit the Tohoku region.

The quake was one of the biggest on record, and the tsunami it caused washed away cars, homes, office buildings and thousands of people, and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Huge boats were dropped miles away from the ocean in the towering jumbled debris of what had once been cities, cars toppled on their sides like playthings among the ruined streets and obliterated buildings.

Many wondered if the area would ever return to what it was before.

A big lesson from Japan is that a disaster of this size doesn’t ever really have a conclusion – a lesson Turkey itself knows well from a 1999 earthquake in the country’s northwest that killed some 18,000 people. Despite speeches about rebuilding, the Tohoku quake has left a deep gash in the national consciousness and the landscapes of people’s lives.

Take the death toll.

Deaths directly attributable to the quake in Turkey will level off in coming weeks, but it’s unlikely to be the end.

Japan, for instance, has recognized thousands of other people who died later from stress-related heart attacks, or because of poor living conditions.

And despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Japan on reconstruction, some things won’t ever come back – including a sense of place.

Before the quake, Tohoku was filled with small cities and villages, surrounded by farms, the ports filled with fleets of fishing boats. It’s one of the wildest, most beautiful coastlines in Japan.

Today, while the wreckage of the quake and tsunami has largely been removed and many roads and buildings rebuilt, there are still large areas of empty space, places where buildings haven’t been erected, farms haven’t been replanted. Businesses have spent years trying to reconstruct decimated customer bases.

Just as workers once did in Japan, an army of rescuers in Turkey and Syria are digging through obliterated buildings, picking through twisted metal, pulverized concrete and exposed wires for survivors.

What comes next won’t be easy. In Japan, there was initially a palpable pride in the country’s ability to endure disaster.

People stood calmly in long, orderly lines for food and water. They posted notices on message boards in destroyed towns with descriptions of loved ones in the hopes that rescue workers would find them.