Tokyo Airport and the Earthquake

  by Alexander Holzbach

I was playing computer games on the computer at the Admiral’s club at the Tokyo Airport on the morning of March 11, 2011.  The game was at Lego.com and it was called “Hero Factory.”  I had won a game and lost a game, so I was eager to win another game.  Then, I felt some shaking.  I thought it was a big loud airplane, so I tried to ignore it.  But it kept on getting bigger.  Then my Dad came running over, and said, “There’s an earthquake happening.”

We ran out the door of the Admiral’s Club into the main airport and we crouched down with our hands over our heads.  A bunch of other people went over and leaned against the wall.  It was eerily quiet.  All the conversations stopped, because everybody was so frightened.  All I did was wait until the vibrations got smaller. 

I went back to my computer game afterwards, and then my father told me that we had to get out of the airport.  We ran out to the runways with everybody on the side of the airport I was on.  Then a huge aftershock, that was bigger than most earthquakes, happened.  Everything was shaking again.  Some of us went into a big bus that had a heater on because it was cold outside.  From the window of the bus I saw a curtain blowing out of an airport window that wasn’t made to open. 

After a while, everybody started going back into the airport.  My bus parked, and we stayed in the bus for a while.  I liked it because it was warm, but there was a couple of times that the bus started shaking more than a bus could by itself.  I learned that it was because of more aftershocks. Finally , we all had to go back inside the building because the flight attendants told us that we needed to go back into the building but they didn’t know why. Once we were in the building , we looked in the buses and saw  cleaning crews in them . I thought the buses were clean and I could not understand why they made us go away and put cleaning crews in. Then the cleaning crews left the buses and we still had to stay out.

Then we learned that we would have to sleep in the airport in a huge room with everyone else. The flight attendant gave us blankets. Me and my little brother, Andrew, made a bed with the blankets . We got more blankets to use as pillow. After a while we played with little tops on the floor. Then the flight attendants brought us airplane bread for dinner. We didn’t really like the bread, but we still ate it. After that our mom told us to go to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable because the floor was really hard , cold, and there was so many little aftershocks. Later at night, my dad got a sleeping bag which I used instead of the bed I made, finally, I went to sleep! In my dreams I was thinking of what everybody in America would think of my story.