At 2:46 p.m. local time, the Pacific Plate thrust westward beneath the North American Plate. The rupture zone was approximately 500 kilometers long and 200 kilometers wide. The seabed uplifted by meters. The released energy was equivalent to approximately 600 million times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. The earthquake lasted six minutes.
The water displaced formed a tsunami. Wave heights exceeded 40 meters in some areas. The inundation zone covered 561 square kilometers. The force scoured the land to bedrock. The official death toll is 19,759. The missing number 2,553.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s sea walls were designed for a 5.7-meter tsunami. The waves that reached it were over 14 meters high. The flooding disabled power and cooling. Three reactors underwent meltdowns. The event was classified as Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Only the Chernobyl disaster shares this classification.
The language here is controlled because the event defies embellishment. The numbers are the story. They describe a force that overwhelmed human preparation on a civilization-scale. The response was not panic, but a meticulous, doomed effort to comply with protocols that no longer matched the physical reality. The lesson is in the discrepancy between the designed-for event and the possible event. The margin was catastrophic.