By Stefanie Avila, Special to The Chronicle
“It seemed normal to everyone around me…until it wasn’t, all the children started to whimper and the other teachers didn’t know what to do at one point,” said Caroline Cabal, 22, an English teacher that worked in Japan for almost two years up until a week ago.” Japan was beautiful, but once the earthquake hit it wasn’t
the same.”
Cabal lived in the town of Nagano, about 130 miles from the epicenter. Her town felt a high 6 or low 7 on the Richter scale. Early that morning, Cabal and her boyfriend, Daniel Conglio, 28, were at the market getting breakfast when their phones and the phones of everyone around them rang. The message read “earthquake warning five minutes,” but since earthquakes are normal in Japan no one really paid much attention to it, and in fact they felt nothing when five minutes passed.
The Japanese government sends a message to every cell phone in Japan that is registered for emergencies.
Later, Cabal was teaching her first grade class when alarms in the school went off and an announcement on the loudspeaker announced, “Earthquake in five minutes, please do not panic.” This time, the Earth actually shook. Earthquakes usually last about 2-3 minutes; this earthquake lasted 5 minutes.
“Those were the longest 5 minutes of my life,” Cabal said. “It felt like an hour had passed and it was never going to end.”
The town of Nagano is land-locked and was not effected by the tsunami, but the earthquake left houses broken down the middle with shattered glass everywhere.
“We had taken the children outside to the playground to evacuate the building for safety purposes, but after the initial earthquake, all there was were aftershocks, one after another, after another.”
Aftershocks reached a 4.3 on the Richter scale and recurred often because of the severity of the initial 8.9 quake. They can last up to a month after the initial quake.
For Cabal, the aftershocks led her to miss home. “I couldn’t deal with the shaking; I woke up every morning after the earthquake to an aftershock instead of my alarm clock. I just couldn’t do it. While I was teaching class, there were aftershocks, when I was driving home there were aftershocks, when I was using the bathroom there were aftershocks, I couldn’t do it. I was scared; Americans aren’t trained for this type of lifestyle. I wanted to cry every time.”
With the nuclear crisis that spawned from the quake, radiation in Tokyo’s tap water spiked to twice the level tolerable for infants, but it remains safe for adults, according to officials. Officials in Nagano said that as soon as residents get home from being outside, clothes should immediately be changed due to possible radiation. Getting food from the supermarket two days after the earthquake was “no picnic,” Cabal said. “I had to fight to get one
of the last few bottles of water in the supermarket.” Conglio says that, “it wasn’t so bad right after the earthquake…it just progressively got worse, and then we decided that twiddling our thumbs here in Japan wasn’t going to get any better, so we decided to head back home. It was the only option.”
Caroline Cabal is Stefanie Avila’s cousin.
