What it was like for Marines responding to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history

Lt. Col. Giuseppe Stavale was in a situation no parent wants to be in. It was early afternoon on March 11, 2011, and a massive earthquake, followed by a 140-foot tall tsunami, had just struck the coast of northeast Japan. The city of Tokyo, where Stavale was stationed, was shaking around him, and he could not find his teenage daughter.

“I was trying to get in touch with my daughter to ensure she was ok, but all the cellular phone networks stopped working, either due to outages or being overwhelmed by volume of calls,” the Marine said in a recent press release. “We were watching the news footage, seeing collapses, and we realized that it reached much further than Tokyo, it was extensive.”

Fortunately, Stavale managed to track down his daughter and pick her up in his car. His wife, meanwhile, survived with their twins while taking shelter in the family living room. They were the lucky ones. Nearly 16,000 people lost their lives in what became known as the Great East Japan earthquake, and the ensuing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which the earthquake and tsunami set off.

Now, on the ten-year anniversary of the triple-catastrophe, the Japanese government and the U.S. Marine Corps took time to remember both the massive losses of the event and the monumental efforts of Japanese first responders, civilians, and nearly 25,000 American service members who worked together to rebuild in the face of disaster.