Page 18 - Debris Fields News Today

Underneath the wreckage. with this debris, its not like in haiti where you have an earthquake and buildings collapsed and you could tell where people were going to be. with the tsunami, its not the earthquake damage necessarily that killed most people. its the water. so you have this fast-moving water, which would have swept people away and then theres all this debris, cars and homes and houses and wood and steel in this water. and they may have been deposited miles away from where they lived or...

Died as the thickness of these debris fields. there are several americans still missing at this point. i want to show you pictures at this point. at least two, 24-year-old woman named taylor anderson from virginia. i talked to her parents the other day. shes been teaching english in japan for three years. her parents havent spoken to her since last wednesday. her parents want to go look for her themselves. obviously i talked to her dad, andy. he said he would like to come here and look but hes b...

Whats incredible is even with no sign of life, people keep coming back. theres a couple picking their way through this rubble that you can barely walk through, trying to find something that maybe they can take back. late in the day, the hope of finding someone alive gave way to desperate reality. a body was found in this house. so this area devastated by the tsunami. no survivors found here in the wreckage. so we move on to the next area. >> brian todd joins us now. brian, ive worked with these ...

Attempting to restore electricity at the nuclear plant. the electricity was knocked out started this because they could no longer use electricity to cool the -- to keep water pumping and to cool the fuel rods. and thats why the fuel rods were able to heat up. they are attempting to restore electricity. they hope to do that again today. all of this information is coming from this private company company tepco. no way to now how accurate it is or if they are being optimistic in their pronouncement...

Find fuel, water, food. and a similar thing to what gary said. people were asking us, so what are you hearing? what do you know? what should we do next? there didnt seem to be a clear plan now that youve lost your home, theres no heat, its really cold, and whats the next step? its interesting to watch people seeming to be very externally calm. i think japanese people have a reputation of being calm and centered but the questions i was being asked started to indicate people were worrying about wh...

People were, knew where to look. these are debris fields that have been carried great dista e distance, miles even by the water and then as the water left, been deposited there so even if you know where people live in a town, thats not where youre going to find their bodies if theyve perished. their bodies may be miles away underneath, you know, 15 feet of debris. so what search and rescue teams are finding is that in a lot of these areas it is extraordinarily slow going. they dont have in many ...

In order to just clear out a lot of the debris that were seeing. the debris fields, gary, in these areas, are so deep. its going to require a lot of equipment before we even know the full death toll. >> not only that, anderson, but here, were in the middle right now of a tremendous snowstorm. theres a near blizzard. 12 or 13 inches of snow on the ground. its very cold, very windy. they cant do any work out here right now. even if they can go outside or go to their homes to see whats going on, th...

What should we do next? there didnt seem to be a clear plan now that youve lost your home, theres no heat, its really cold, and whats the next step? its interesting to watch people be very calm. i think japanese people have a reputation of being calm and centered but the questions i was being asked started to indicate people were worrying about what is the next step. >> theres growing anxiety. a credibility gap over the nuclear issue and the public statements being made about that, and the reali...

Of course, the money isnt what were worried about. right now certainly, the numbers of dead just seems to be growing, anderson. where do people think that ends up when they finally tally the thousands of people who are at this point just missing? any order of magnitudes, to the sense of tragedy, how big this becomes? >> reporter: you know, officials really havent said -- there was one police official in myagi prefecture who said it would go into the tens of thousands. no one knows. its frustrati...

And they dont know where theyre going to go after this. >> and for evacuees, theres the nuclear issue, but really for people who are homeless right now in dealing with the aftermath of the tsunami, thats the main focus. >> theyre focussed on trying to find fuel, water, food. and a similar thing to what gary said. people were asking us, so what are you hearing? what do you know? what should we do next? there didnt seem to be a clear plan now that youve lost your home, theres no heat, its really c...