are going from house to house, hoping to find survivors, but it s just not going to happen, not in that particular area, john, because of the scale of devastation. we spoke to one man who clung to his roof while the tsunami came through and he said if the water had gone any higher, he would have been swept away. they saw neighbors swept away. and a lot of these people are elderly too, these coastal areas, a lot of these people are eld elderly, they just didn t have enough time between the earthquake hitting and then the tsunami, that ten-meter wall of water just racing through, it s like less than half an hour. so so many of those older people just weren t able to get to higher ground. when you re out with these people, do you get the sensea they re beginning to come to grips with is scope of this or is there largely still just a
when something like this happens. so everybody was told, you could hear on all the tvs, making announcements on the street over loud speakers to get away to evacuate if you re anywhere near water. if you re anywhere near that sort of area, to get away from it. and it is, we either, there were several minutes before the water actually hit. they can predict it with very, very high degree of accuracy. and so there is a good hope, at least i hope that many of the people watching tv and heard about this and know about tsunamis from living in that area were able to evacuate the shorelines. but you can t tell. when you see thing like cars being swept away in the water, is there somebody in there? that s something that is weighing on all of our minds right now. and something that struck me, matt, when i was talking to our reporter in tokyo was the time, the delay between the earthquake hitting and the final decision to evacuate people from an underground area. from the subways there which i
found striking. anywhere else, there wouldn t necessarily be that delay and would you move very quickly. is that because people are so used to earthquakes hitting that it takes them a little while to assess whether this is a deadly one and they need to move quickly. you know, i think absolutely that japanese people are more attuned to earthquakes. they re more used to it certainly than i was where i grew up on the east coast of the united states, we don t have much in the way of earthquakes. and they tend to take it in stride. but this was larger than anyone expected. it went on for longer than anyone expected and there is a high degree of self-sufficiency among people here. person isly with are ready to earthquakes. as my wife showed where she was cool head asked had all of these techniques for dealing with an earthquake hitting, i m sure long before an official announcement to evacuate, people felt these tremors would have some sense of when to do and begin to leave the areas. the
this, as the warnings come out to them there could be a six to seven foot tsunami wave hitting them at around 3:00 a.m. local time. about four hours from now. so, we hope the best for them. we are watching that. if you are just joining us, straight to the update in terms of what we know right now, an 8.9 earthquake hitting off the coast. the northeast coast of japan. this only about 230 miles northeast of tokyo. on this map here, you can see the epicenter and the red circle at 230 miles southwest of that is where tokyo is. 13 million people as the buildings were shaking, 8.9 magnitude earthquake. roughly an hour later, tsunami waves hitting the coast of
trickle over into the goal and tied up the game. 1-1, is the world cup opening round. harris: a lot of breaking news at this hour. a tsunami warning we ve been telling but, indian ocean. a massive earthquake hitting in the past hour. and we re also following the search for survivors of that flash flood that ripped through parts of arkansas. remember, we saw the governor talking about all the efforts to find at least two dozen suspected missing people from a campground. we ll be right back.