Two years after the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Margareta Wahlström, the Chief of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), revisited a town in the Miyagi Prefecture that she first visited six months after the March 11, 2011 earthquake. On this second visit to Minami-Sanriku, Ms. Wahlström met once again with Mayor Jin Sato and received an update on the continuing efforts of the town to recover. Yuki Matsuoka, writing for the UNISDR website, noted that “the town lost 566 of its 17,300 inhabitants, and 266 are still unaccounted for. The damage was immense, 3,142 houses were completely washed away and another 169 severely damaged and left uninhabitable.” Part of the town, Matsubara Park, had “functioned as a debris repository after the earthquake and was overwhelmingly full when Ms. Wahlström first visited. Since then, the debris has been moved to a debris processing site as part of an extensive management plan.”

According to Matsuoka, “The ten year recovery plan includes a huge relocation project to move the residential area of Minami-Sanriku from the valley to the highlands, which required broad consultation with the community. The coastal areas will be used for parks and industrial establishments, while the residential and public service areas will be relocated to areas above the height of the tsunami experienced on 11 March 2011, however, rezoning and leveling of the residential areas will take quite some time due to the gradient of the land.”