Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown – A Story of Tragedy, Hope and Healing

Fukushima is a place forever marked by a triple disaster. Within minutes, a massive earthquake, devastating tsunami, and nuclear meltdown unleashed an unprecedented wave of death, displacement, and destruction across the Tohoku region of Japan. Thousands of people and most of their worldly possessions were washed away in a matter of minutes. Hundreds of thousands of survivors were left displaced. It began at 14:46 on 11 March 2011, when the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan struck off the country’s eastern Pacific coast. The two tectonic plates along the long offshore fault line ruptured with a force at least 1,000 times more powerful than the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. The resulting 9.0-magnitude quake was so powerful that it triggered a 15-metre (50 ft) high tsunami. The giant wave swept over parts of the Sanriku coastline of Japan’s main island of Honshu, killing around 20,000 people, including several thousand whose bodies were never recovered, and wiping entire towns off the map.