The Good-Luck City

The 346,000 inhabitants of the seaport of Niigata, 160 miles north of Tokyo, have long regarded themselves as fortunate. In earthquake-prone Japan, Niigata had never been hit by a temblor. During World War II, Niigata suffered only minor U.S. air raids. On the August day in 1945 when the atom bomb was first dropped on Japan, Niigata was the alternate target in case of bad weather. But the skies that day had been clear over Hiroshima. Small wonder, Niigata was known as the "GoodLuck City."

At 1:02 p.m. one day last week, Niigata's luck changed. Said one survivor: "The ground rose up as though a giant had awakened underground and was trying to get out into the sunlight." The shock of the earthquake tumbled a brand-new bridge into the Shinano River. For a few moments the river ran backward, broke through embankments and flooded half the city. A four-story apartment house slowly fell over on its back, carrying with it a terrified housewife who had been hanging laundry on the roof. When the rolling stopped, she stepped to the ground, unhurt, as were the other residents of the house.

At the airport, Photographer Fukuo Yuminamochi, 27, was about to take off in a private Cessna. "We were warming up at the end of the runway," he recalls. "Suddenly, there was a rumbling noise over the sound of the engine, and the plane began jumping around as if it were fighting turbulence in the sky. I watched the terminal building crack open at the sides and sag to earth." Dozens of oil tanks on the city's outskirts burst into flame, sending up columns of choking black smoke 20,000 ft. high. The tanks burned for 96 hours, despite efforts by U.S. planes to smother the flames with foam bombs. A tidal wave hurled fishing boats far inland. A nearby island rose 9 ft. in a series of jolts, as if a giant were using a lever. Tunnels caved in; a train was buried beneath the collapse of an overpass.

Officials put the damage at over a billion dollars and estimate they will be rebuilding the city for the next two years. Yet Niigata had not exhausted all its luck. Only 27 people died and 403 were injured--a miraculously low figure for an earthquake that measured 7.7 on the Richter scale, only slightly less than Japan's worst, the 7.9 temblor of 1923 that killed 142,807.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.