Japan Update: As of 21:30, 19 April, TOKYO

Disaster victims teamed up on day after quake to deliver baby

On March 12, the day after the Great East Japan Earthquake, people at one evacuation shelter combined their strength to help an expectant mother safely deliver her child amidst trying circumstances.

Tokyo resident Yuki Terada, 35, was visiting her parents’ home in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture. Ahead of her scheduled birth on March 25, she had come back to temporarily stay in her hometown in mid-February. On the morning of March 11, she had an examination and was told that her pregnancy was proceeding smoothly. That afternoon, the earthquake struck.

Together with her 37-year-old sister Ai Nakamura and their two parents, she tried to flee to higher ground, but the tsunami was too fast. The water level on the road in front of her parents’ house quickly rose, and soon the first floor of the house was submerged. The four just barely made it to the safety of the second floor. Once there, however, Terada began having abdominal pains. Her water had broken.

She and her family tried again and again to call emergency services, but their calls could not get through. They were trapped in the house, which had begun to lean. Terada spent that snowy night wrapped in a futon blanket, shivering from the cold and her own anxiety.

Elsewhere, at the Ishinomaki Red Cross Hospital, 39-year-old midwife Kiyomi Odajima had brought her oldest daughter for immunization shots when the earthquake hit. She tried to head to the school where her younger daughter and son were, but police stopped her because the flood waters had spread.

After spending the night at the police station, the next morning she made her way to Yamashita elementary school, which was serving as an evacuation shelter.

A man there was calling out, “Are there any doctors or nurses here?” Odajima asked the man what had happened, and he told her that there was a woman in labor. He guided Odajima to the school nurse room, where she saw Terada lying on a couch. Terada had been rescued by police, found in over knee-deep, oily water after leaving her parents’ house.

After noon, Terada began experiencing birthing pains at a faster rate. Odajima judged that giving birth in the heater-less evacuation shelter was dangerous. However, Yamashita elementary and its surroundings were cut off from outside help. Time to make a decision on where to give birth was running out, when a woman appeared who offered her home. She was 43-year-old Wakako Takagi, whose house on high ground behind the school had not been damaged by the tsunami.

Evacuees in the school heard about Terada’s plight and also went into action. Nurses who happened to be at the school went to a medicine company in the city. They received and brought back supplies including disinfectant fluid, absorbent cotton, and intravenous drip equipment. A school health nurse, meanwhile, prepared warm water using a tabletop stove.