Coquitlam realtor Kevin Byrne was knocked to the ground but thought nothing of it when the earth started shaking six floors below his room at the Star Hotel in Yokohama, Japan.
He got up and turned on the TV. The shaking continued and he updated his Facebook status to include mention of it.
"The newscaster started talking about the earthquake and then his face went white as the shaking intensified right in front of me. The same thing I was feeling, I was watching it being reflected in the newsman's face. It was more disconcerting than anything I've ever experienced in an earthquake. I thought, 'Those guys are panicked.'"
Having lived in Japan for 14 years before moving back there from Coquitlam in January, leaving his job at Royal LePage and pulling his kids Patrick, 8, and Kaitlyn, 5, out of Glen elementary, Byrne has endured "hundreds" of earthquakes, he told The Tri-City News just hours after the initial quake.
"Sometimes you wake up and the bed is shaking and pictures fall off the wall, but you just go back to sleep. They don't even wake me up anymore," he said.
But this was different. This time he feared for his life.
"This was The Big One; the one that I thought my family was avoiding by coming back to Canada."
The day before, Byrne had accepted a teaching job at a school in Fukushima, an area in the north ravaged by the quake and resulting tsunami and since rocked by multiple explosions and reports of radiation leakage at its nuclear plant.
"I got the job offer basically 24 hours before the earthquake and I haven't got in touch with those people since and I don't even know if that school is there anymore," he said.
While the windows rattled and luggage came crashing down out of his closet, Byrne ran into the hallway to the emergency exit, both hands pressed against the walls to keep himself upright.
Making his way down the street, Byrne found Yokohama already filled with office workers who had fled their jobs. The power was out. A broken water main was flooding the street. There were fires. The trains and traffic had stopped.
The violent shaking lasted for five minutes, by Byrne's estimate, and then, less than 10 minutes later, it started again.
"And that kind of uncertainty persisted for about six hours."
In that time, Byrne made his way to his mother-in-law's where his wife and children were living.
His wife, daughter and mother-in-law were out, but he found Patrick in a nearby park, cradling their chihuahua. And while the power lines still swayed back and forth, already emergency response teams were at work securing neighbourhoods and opening up nearby shelters.
"If this was going on in Coquitlam, I'd be really concerned about his safety and not just from falling debris but from my son being home alone," he said. "But here, you know your neighbours and... there's no danger of strangers coming along."
Byrne stressed that, in his opinion, Metro Vancouver is dangerously unprepared for a major quake, not only in its emergency preparedness measures but in its lack of social cohesion required to band together and carry on after a natural disaster.
"If this happened in the Lower Mainland, there'd be chaos. It would be the zombie apocalypse. Here everyone's just trying to get back to normal; get food, water and help eachother out and get home."
By Monday, Byrne told The News that rolling blackouts and cripplingly limited train service were still the norm in Yokohama, but people were already getting back to work. Meanwhile, the local television stations continue to run desperate notices of missing loved ones beside assurances of others' safety, while the death toll from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami continues to climb.
