There is still a traffic jam these days along Hama Kaido, the two-lane road that parallels this city’s former coastal playground for miles. But the minivans and sedans that once roamed in search of picnic grounds, golf courses and horse stables have been replaced by thousands of dump trucks. A Donald Duck doll, one of the personal items that crews have pulled from the rubble. The city has turned the tsunami-torn seaside parks here into gigantic dumps for the one million tons of debris that are expected to be collected during the next three years. In effect, the city’s front yard has been transformed into the final resting place for the detritus created by the disaster four months ago.
The cleanup is expected to cost at least $1.3 billion, with most of the financing provided by the central government. Sendai has wasted no time putting the money to use. In downtown Sendai, with its modern office towers, high-end retail outlets and wide avenues, one has to look hard to find evidence of Japan’s strongest earthquake on record.
But a few miles east toward the ocean, the destruction is shocking. Though a remarkable amount of debris has been removed, cars, tractors, boats and homes remain mired in fields filled with seawater that must be fully drained before rice can be replanted.
Many of the roughly 9,000 homes destroyed in the disaster in Sendai were along this stretch of coastline. A few of the abandoned homes that remain have become impromptu workshops for welders, stonecutters and carpenters. The devastation would have been worse had the banks of an elevated highway about two miles inland not served as a buffer against the surging waves.
The city has been removing debris from the roads, homes and factories to jump-start reconstruction efforts, but also to return a sense of normalcy to a region turned inside out, both physically and psychically, in a matter of hours on March 11.
The three incinerators being built on 250 acres of former parkland will begin operating by the end of the year. For now, fleets of trucks have been rolling into the dumps six days a week to drop off all manner of waste pulled from the city streets, homes, factories and farmland.
In this narrow, mountainous country, landfills are at a premium. So the city plans to recycle half of what it collects, instead of the usual 30 percent. This will generate extra revenue from the sale of various metals and other items and perhaps give workers at the dumps a feeling of renewal.
“It is certainly sad what happened here,” said Hiromichi Fujikata, the manager who is overseeing the operations at the Ido dump, one of three now in use near the shore. “But this work gives me a sense of making something that would otherwise be wasted.”
To meet its ambitious target, the city has garbage haulers presort the trash they pick up, a process that slows down collection now, but will speed things along once the recycling begins in August and when the incinerators begin operating after that.
Teams in other coastal cities like Rikuzentakata and Ofunato have also moved quickly to clear roads, rice fields and rubble. But many of these places sit flush between the mountains and the sea, and must dump their trash in central locations and sort it later. Miyako and Kesennuma are recycling six types of trash; south of Sendai, Natori is recycling 10 categories of garbage.
In all, the earthquake and tsunami created about 27 million tons of debris, said Nagahisa Hirayama, a professor at Kyoto University. In Miyagi Prefecture alone, officials expect to collect 18 million tons of garbage, equal to about 23 years’ worth of waste. The numbers would be higher if the tsunami had not swept entire neighborhoods out to sea.
Despite the randomness of the damage on land, the dumps in Sendai, like much else in Japan, are models of order amid seeming chaos. White plastic planters with marigolds line the parking lot next to the trailer that serves as an administrative office at the Ido dump. Visitors to the trailer must take off their shoes and don slippers.
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