PORT ANGELES — Is the black float found on a Neah Bay area beach really from the Japan tsunami?
Last Thursday, Tomoko Dodo, senior consul from the Consulate General of Japan in Seattle, visited the home of Arnold Schouten, a member of Surfrider Foundation, to see the float for herself.
It is the first item found that there is some degree of confidence that it might be tracked back to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan’s northwest coast last March.
Dodo and an assistant closely examined the buoy, measuring, photographing details and recording a number of markings that may indicate where it was made or sold.
The markings did not immediately indicate the buoy’s exact origin, noting that oyster farms are common on the entire Pacific coast.
“It’s impossible to confirm,” Dodo said, noting that she and her assistant don’t have the knowledge of fishing equipment needed to identify the float.
The photos and notes will be sent to Tokyo to be examined by experts in the field, she said.
After a photo of the float was sent to Japan in December, it was tentatively identified by Japanese fishermen as a type that is used in oyster farming off the coast of Sendai, Japan, the area hardest hit by the tsunami.
Schouten, who has been surfing off of Clallam beaches since 1974, was a member of the team that pulled the buoy, along with 1,800 pounds of other marine debris and trash, off of an isolated beach near Neah Bay.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Schouten said.
Hundreds of similar floats were photographed within huge rafts of debris that floated away from Japan after a 9.0 earthquake caused 70-foot to 80-foot waves that scoured coastal areas.
Most of the debris is just debris, Dodo said, but no one knows what may wash up on Washington shores.
However, Dodo asked that anything that is found that could be considered a personal “keepsake” for a survivor — something that is clearly from the tsunami — be reported to local authorities or the consulate in Seattle at 206-682-9107.
“It’s difficult to predict what kinds of items there are, if any,” she said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has set up an email address to track all other possible tsunami debris at disasterdebris@noaa.gov.
Early estimates stated that 25 million tons of debris was dragged out to sea by the tsunami waves, but most of it is expected to sink into the ocean depths.
At least some of it is expected to wash up on U.S. and Canadian beaches in the next few years.
The Japanese government has created an interagency task force to track the debris, and official announcements with more accurate estimates of the volume of the actual debris field and its location are expected to be released in the next few months, Dodo said.
That task force has been working closely with the U.S. State Department and NOAA, she said.
A public memorial event will be held to honor those who died in the Tohoku tsunami will be held in Seattle.
The memorial will be held at 2:46 on March 11 at Kobe Bell Plaza in Seattle with a moment of silence and the ringing of the bell.
The bell was given to Seattle by the city of Kobe in 1962 as part of the sister-city exchange in conjunction with the Seattle World’s Fair.
Since 1996, it has been rung on Jan. 17 in commemoration of the 6,434 people who died in the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
This year, that memorial did not occur, and the new memorial will take its place, Dodo said.
More than 15,000 people died in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and more than 3,000 are still missing.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
