so zach sprinted there, made his way to the teacher s room. and i asked them, you know, have you seen georgia? and they said they hadn t, had not seen her, and i kind of lost it a bit at that, at that point. zach staggered outside, out of options, his despair now total. what was happening in your mind in there? just, just feeling so lost, that feeling that i ve been trying to suppress the feeling of she s not all right. it began growing in size immensely, as each minute went by. one of the teachers came outside to comfort him with a cup of tea. telling me, you know, it s okay. daiju rud, it s okay, it s okay, hugging me and patting me on the back as i m crying, so, yeah.
walls of debris of these houses toppled over boats, you know, just anything you could imagine, you know? i mean, metal electric poles just bent as if someone had just come through and doop! but he knew georgia s place was on a hill. if she d gone there before the tsunami hit, she d be all right. but when he got there no sign that she was there. everything was still left exactly the way we had left it from the previous morning when we both went to work. as he went back outside, zach could see down into the center of town. that s where georgia s office was, where she was, when the earthquake hit. and what he saw chilled him to the bone. what i could see of the central part of the village that was so destroyed, in my mind, i just could not see how nobody survived in that city building? well, yeah. shaking that from his mind, zach thought georgia might have gone out to help one of the three schools where she taught, but when he got to the
then out of nowhere, a van pulled up, two men hopped out. zach recognized one as a colleague of georgia s. they didn t look happy. zach tried to ask them. georgia, you know, where is she? where is she? and they didn t say, because they spoke no english and i spoke no japanese, just pretty much, like let s go, pointing to the van, and just kind of pushing me into the van. they were taking him to city hall. as you were being driven in that van, did you have any idea what they were driving you to see? no. did you know that they had been taking bodies to the city hall? no. no, i no. you didn t know that? didn t know. city hall had in fact become the temporary morgue. was that where he d find georgia? coming up, the news everyone had been waiting for. he was very brave for what he did, very brave, that you d do that for people that you love. when dateline continues. two men had pushed zach brennan
basically that was all it said. what was that like? of course we wanted more detail. it was relief. zach was alive, all they needed to know for now, but georgia? still no word. well, his parents worried about him at home, zach was riding out the chaos in kuji. i wasn t really sure what was going on at first. after the shaking stopped, zach and his co-workers moved up to the top floor of the kuji city hall, a sort of crow s nest, with a view of the whole city and the coastline. so if something is going to happen, this is where you d see it. yes. and then he saw it, something about the rivers that split the city and normally flow out to the sea. the river was beginning to flow in the opposite direction. the water began to change color as well. it began growing from this kind of bluish color to being very murky. even four stories up, zach could hear the roaring river.
keith morrison (voiceover): zach and georgia were 200 miles north of fukushima. and as the days passed, they began to feel the danger from the radiation, at least where they were, was subsiding. so they stayed. even helped with the cleanup. and then about a month later, funny how these things go. zach and georgia got another shock. another one of those life changing developments. zach told his parents about it during one of their regular sunday phone calls. and he said have you checked your email yet? and said, no. and he said, why don t you guys look at your email together. and so i said, oh zach, what now? keith morrison (voiceover): after all the worry and dread they d experienced over their son s time in japan, zach brannon s parents weren t quite prepared for the next bit of news. so we opened the email and there s an ultrasound picture.