TOKYO — Rescuers struggled to reach survivors this morning as Japan reeled after an earthquake and tsunami struck in deadly tandem. An 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in Japan, triggered a devastating tsunami that sent walls of water washing over coastal cities. Tsunami warnings and high waves reached to the West Coast of the United States.
The preliminary death toll was in the hundreds, but domestic media quoted government officials as saying it would almost certainly rise to more than 1,000.
About 200 to 300 bodies were found along the water line in Sendai, a port city in the northeastern part of the country and the closest major city to the epicenter. Thousands of homes were destroyed, many roads were impassible, trains and buses were not running, and power and cellphones remained down in the region.
Japanese officials today issued broad evacuation orders for people living in the vicinity of two nuclear power plants that had experienced breakdowns in their cooling systems as a result of the earthquake, and said small amounts of radiation had leaked from both plants.
Some radiation had seeped outside the plant, with levels just outside the facility’s main gate measured at eight times normal, public broadcaster NHK quoted nuclear safety officials as saying. The safety officials said there was no immediate health hazard to nearby residents from the leakage, which they described as minute, and people were urged to evacuate the area calmly.
While the loss of life and property may yet be considerable, many lives were certainly saved by Japan’s extensive disaster preparedness and strict construction codes. Japan’s economy was spared a more devastating blow because the earthquake hit far from its industrial heartland.
The United States Geological Survey said the quake was the most severe worldwide since an 8.8 quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago that killed more than 400. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake spawned a tsunami that killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean.
The survey said that yesterday’s quake was centered off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of the Japanese islands, at a point about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and a depth of about 17 miles below the earth’s surface.
The earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. Japan time, shaking skyscrapers more than 100 miles away, collapsing buildings and roads, and generating tsunami waves up to 30 feet high. Buildings, cars, and ships were swept away in the flood. Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted.
Vasily Titov, director of the Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. “It’s not very much time. In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis. But it’s still not enough time.’’
Complicating the issue, he added, is that the flat terrain in the area would have made it difficult for people to reach higher, and thus safer, ground. “There are not many places they could go,’’ he said.
Yesterday, NHK television showed footage of a huge fire sweeping across Kesennuma, a city of more than 70,000 people in the northeast. Whole blocks appeared to be ablaze.
NHK also showed aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof. The runway was partly submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks.
Even in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, the quake struck hard. William M. Tsutsui, a professor of Japanese business and economic history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was getting off a bus in front of a hotel in Tokyo, where he was traveling with a business delegation, when the ground began to shake.
“What was scariest was to look up at the skyscrapers all around,’’ he said. “They were swaying like trees in the breeze.’’
Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the quake and tsunami caused major damage across wide areas.
President Obama said the United States “stands ready to help’’ Japan deal with the aftermath. “Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the people of Japan,’’ he said in a statement. He later spoke with Kan and offered assistance.
American military airfields in Japan began accepting civilian flights diverted from airports that suffered damage, American officials said early yesterday.
A spokesman for the American Seventh Fleet in Japan said that Naval Air Field Atsugi had received several commercial passenger planes that could not land at Narita airport outside Tokyo.
Officials said Yokota Air Base also received civilian flights. In addition, three American warships in southeast Asia will be ordered out to sea to reposition themselves in case they are directed to provide assistance, according to a fleet spokesman.
Reports from Sendai suggested that wave heights reached more than 12 feet above normal as the first tsunami wave struck.
Tokyo subways emptied, while airports were closed. Many residents set off on epic journeys home, walking for miles across a vast metropolitan area.
Waves in parts of Hawaii reached 7 feet above normal, damaging piers and marinas and causing some flooding. But by midmorning, sunbathers had returned to Waikiki Beach, although in smaller numbers than usual.
In North America, the Coast Guard said that one person was swept to sea near McKinleyville, Calif., while trying to take pictures of the approaching waves. A search had begun.
Four people were also swept to sea in Curry County, Ore., overtaken as they, too, were watching the waves. Two managed to get back to shore, officials said, while the others — one of whom almost drowned — were rescued.
In California, powerful waves sank several boats in Santa Cruz Harbor, about 60 miles southeast of San Francisco on Monterey Bay.
The sudden movement of a portion of a tectonic plate underwater can displace enormous amounts of water, triggering a tsunami. As the tsunami waves approach shallow coastal areas, they tend to increase in height.
The devastation often comes from a succession of waves, with the first few being relatively small. The waves can propagate across oceans at speeds of 500 miles an hour or greater.
Tsunami warnings were issued around the Pacific Rim, including in Hawaii and California, but the vast majority of the destructive flooding occurred in Japan itself, in the area nearest the quake’s epicenter.
Tsunami researchers said the pattern was not unusual. With earthquakes like the one in Japan, essentially two tsunamis are generated — one that hits the nearest coastline, often within minutes, and another that can travel for thousands of miles in the opposite direction.
The wave that hits the nearby coastline first is usually the most destructive, said Eric Geist, a scientist with the US Geological Survey. But with the tsunamis that head out to sea, some of the energy dissipates as the wave spreads outward across open ocean, like a ripple from a rock thrown into a pond. Coastal features can then either reduce or amplify some of the energy as the wave reaches land. “Once the first wave hits the coastline, it gets very complicated,’’ he said.
