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- [00:00]
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Apple Representative
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- [01:42]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com if you have a story to tell. Whether it's about story, starting a new business or sharing photos from a recent adventure, Squarespace gives you an all in one platform to bring those stories to life online. With modern templates, mobile responsive design, simple drag and drop tools, and 24 hour support, you can create a professional website or online portfolio in just a few minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, head to squarespace.com and use the offer code themoth to okay, so let's get to this week's story now. The story that you're about to hear by Carl Piliteri was told last year at our annual Moth Members show here in New York City. I remember that show because I hosted it and I just Remember being at the side of the stage thinking that it was such an emotionally charged evening. The story that Carl tells is a really powerful story. The theme of our night was duck and cover stories of fallout. Here's Carl.
- [02:51]
Carl Piliteri
For many years I have worked along the northeast coast of Japan. And when assigned there, I would frequent this one particular restaurant five, six nights a week. And over the years, I came to grow very fond of the older woman who owned and operated it. She didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any Japanese, but we shared a friendship just the same. Upon arrival, I would always slide open her door and take a half step in and look at her and as if to say, hey Mom, I'm home. And she would greet me with this warm and welcoming smile. And she was always happy to see me. She knew what I was there for. The same thing every time, her amazing pan fried chicken dish. And she was a motherly figure to me as well. She was always giving me extra things to eat and just generally a very nice woman. I would stop there so often after work just to rest and relax. Yet I never knew her name or the name of her restaurant. We all referred to her fondly as the Chicken Lady. Her restaurant was located just south of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Generating station, where in 2011 I was working as a field engineer. When you walked through the gates of the Fukushima Nuclear Generating Station, it resembled a botanical garden. The landscaping was immaculate, there was well manicured lawns everywhere, and the trees were pruned to perfection to resemble these large bonsai. And the reactor buildings themselves were painted sky blue with white clouds on them. And it was always my favorite place to work. March 11, March 11, 2011 was a beautiful sunny day. There. My crew and I were working inside of the Reactor one turbine building, a huge rectangular shaped building similar in size to an international airport hangar. And at 2:46 in the afternoon, I had a young man overhead in the crane as an operator. And 10 of us, including myself, were in a very well to find contaminated work zone. And we were dressed from head to toe in our protective clothing when suddenly it felt like someone took a very big hammer and hit the foundation of that very big building. And I turned to my crew and I said, earthquake. This. Sorry. This powerful earthquake caused these massive upheavals of the earth and then these dropping sensations. And it was taking this entire structure. We were within it. It was very violent and it was just starting. I was trying to navigate my way around my crew the whole time keeping an eye on this young man in the overhead crane, and he was taking the ride of his life as this crane just hopped on its tracks and crabbed. And it was really difficult to watch. The concrete floor and walls around us began to crack and sections of ductwork were coming down. But the lights. The lights were dropping everywhere. And this huge, vast space that we were in quickly filled with what I first thought was smoke, but it was actually this thick cloud of dust that was being thrown airborne from this huge structure, getting the living hell shook out of it. And, you know, we were all right there on the borderline of panic. And the lights, we lost the lights. The power to the lights went out, and we were in the pitch black. And this really scared the crap out of all of us. Two young Japanese boys came to me and grabbed a hold of me in the dark. And I had this one tall kid on my left, and he had his arms around my shoulder, and I had my arms around his back. And the other guy was on his knees and he had his arms around my waist, and I had my hand on his shoulder. And we were squeezing each other with every, you know, jolt that this thing was throwing at us. We were huddled up, you know, three grown men, like three little boys. And I began to pray earnestly aloud for all of us. And it disappeared that the Japanese boy on my left was praying in Japanese. And we were standing just yards in front of this massive turbine and generator, which was spinning at 1500 RPMs, being driven by the steam coming right off the reactor. One. Right off the reactor, you know, unit one reactor. And it was at 100% power. And the sounds that began to come out of this turbine catch my attention. And I start to realize that it sounds like it wants to come apart and it's going to explode and it's going to pep rust against the walls. But as if to galvanize and confirm my fears, I hear my American co worker from afar in complete darkness scream, it's going to blow. It's going to blow. And I recognized the terror in his voice. And I stopped praying and I went to a Psalm 23:4. Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. But I couldn't get through it. I broke down in the middle somewhere and I just surrendered. And I asked, let's just please make this quick. So we. We rode it out into the darkness. I mean, we were frozen there. We could feel it and we could hear it, we could smell it, we could even taste it. We just couldn't see it. And about five minutes into that first quake, we catch a break. And the light circuit came back on. But there was only a handful of lights that had survived the quake. But it was enough light to see again. And we were able to get the young man out of the crane. He was in rough shape, but we headed for the door and I made sure I was the last one out because, you know, this was my crew and I was responsible for them. And I took one last look back at the millions of dollars worth of equipment and tooling that I had cared for since 2008. And I just knew I wasn't going to see any of that again. And we finally get outside after many obstacles and we were outside, and we're jumping across cracks in the roadway and we get to a point where we have to split and I have to head up this long stairway up this hillside to where my rental car is parked. And when I get up there, I realized that the power of this quake had shifted all the parked cars and pinned mine in. Mine was blocked. And I took this time out and realized that my heart is beating out of my chest and I'm not breathing. And I just start concentrating on getting my heart and lungs back in sync. And I'm looking down the hillside and there's a freighter in the harbor in front of Fukushima and there's deckhands running around it and there's black smoke coming out of it. And I remember thinking, well, this must be, you know, the procedure during an event of this magnitude. Then it struck me. Are they taking precautions against a possible tsunami? And I watched them cast off and get out of the harbor and head out into the Pacific, due east. And I'm on top of this hillside now and I'm working on my breathing, surveying the damage all around me, which was staggering. And these so called aftershocks, which are actually earthquakes, and they were high on the magnitude scale, which just kept ripping through and just rattling my nerves and the earth around me just distorting like Jello. And I look back out to sea to eyeball the freighter. He's a mile or so out and I see this wall of water coming in from the horizon as far north and as far south as I could see. And it was just a perfect wall of water. And I watched that freighter go up the face of it and I thought he was going to roll and capsize to a starboard, but he cut over the top of it. I don't know who I was talking to. I was alone up there, but I was talking to Mother Nature or God himself. But they both heard me when I shouted across the Pacific at this thing. You got to be fucking kidding me, I said. And I watched. It crashed into the coastline below me in the four reactor buildings. And I stood there in horror as the tremendous power and force of the things, they just snapped everything with it and just took everything in his path with it. And when it hit the coastline, it had nowhere to go but uphill towards me because there was a lot of water behind it. It just continued to push. And I started revisiting that same feeling of doom I just had 20 minutes earlier in the turban building. And my thoughts shifted to all the low lying communities north and south of me there, the ones I was so familiar with. And I'm on top of this hill, but someone must be, someone certainly must be in trouble. And it was a feeling of helplessness. And something happened to me. I went into shock. I felt like I was in this glass bowl. I could see through it, but the inside of it was filled with this like gaseous fog of disbelief. And I watched two more smaller tsunamis come in on top of the first one, only bringing the water up higher. Finally all started to recede back down and it got to the shoreline but continued out and the whole Pacific there receded out to sea. A quarter of a mile, that harbor completely drained in front of my eyes. And I was looking at seabed as far north and as far south as I could see. But with that came this wild weather front from the highlands behind me. These big black ominous clouds came rolling and tumbling real low. And they just whipped across me. And behind it was this. It wasn't even a wind. It was like a vacuum. It was just horizontal, like just coming out to sea. And you could feel the temperature drop. And it began to snow. And I'm standing there thinking, am I witnessing the end of our world? I mean, I truly pondered that. I take this long, dazed walk off site, and to this day I cannot remember the walk. But I get off site to our office and I start to recognize groups of my co workers and familiar faces. When I saw them, I stopped and I turned around and turned my back to him and broke down again. And we were eventually evacuated to this parking lot up in the hills where we spent a very long night. And the power was out, of course, no water. And I tried to call my wife. Sorry, I tried to call my wife for hours, you know, in vain. But the network was busy. And around midnight I asked two friends, I said, take me to town. We slipped out of there, and I said, take me to the chicken, ladies. I wanted to check on her to see if she was there. She needed help, if she was okay. And we got. We arrived, and her little building was cracked right down the face, and she wasn't there. She was nowhere to be found. And I tried calling my wife again, and this time it rang. And when I said her name, she just screamed and kept screaming, and I just kept saying, bad, very bad. And I eventually get home on March 16, five days later. And you would think that, you know, getting home would cure all that ails you, but it was there that everything started to manifest. You know, I learned about the loss of life in Japan. I saw the footage on tv. I learned about the reactors that I had serviced for 20 years exploding behind me. And I was tired. I was exhausted. I had no energy, but I couldn't sleep. And I was depressed, heartbroken, and guilty. And even though I was surrounded with my family, I was alone with these emotions. And I found myself in my recliner like a vegetable for a month before I even realized a month had passed. And nothing was important. Nothing. I was out of work for five months, and I learned of a program set up by the Japanese government allowing residents back into their homes and apartments. And I was going back. That was it. It was absolutely necessary that I go back. I needed to go back. And I returned to the exclusion zone on December 3rd. And after several checkpoints, I was given protective clothing from head to toe again, and not to go to work, but to enter the community and neighborhood where I lived. And I asked my escort to take me to the restaurant first. And when I pulled her door open this time, I was tearing cobwebs with it. And that was unsettling to me because it was obviously clear that no one had opened that door in nine months. And it just made me wonder and worry more about what had happened to her. From there, we went to my apartment. I opened that door for the first time since the morning of March 11th. And when I left for work and it was a shambles, you know, everything was on the floor, and all the contents of the cabinets had been thrown out, and the fridge was on its side. There was cracks in the wall. Even my fiberglass bathtub was shattered. And I started to clean up, and my escort said, you don't have to do this. And I said, yes, I do. You know, I'm responsible for this space and this mess. And I cleaned it all up from end to end. And I found what I was hoping to find was my wedding ring. And I also picked up my alarm clock, the one that woke me up that morning. The battery had popped out of the backside and the hands were frozen at 2:47, the same time as the earthquake. And time had literally stood still in that apartment for nine months. And when I finished there, I backed my way out and closed that door, you know, literally closing that door behind me. It was therapeutic, to say the least, you know. And I had some relief and I had some closure. But I still had one thing I needed to find out. I still needed to learn the fate of the chicken lady Hindu. That night I reached out to the Japan Times and asked them if they could help me find her. Is she with family? Is she gonna be okay? Can I help her? And eventually they did find her and they told me her name. For the first time I learned her name and it was Owada. Owata is her family name, Mrs. Owata San. And they told me the name of her restaurant was Ikoi I K O I. And they told me that Ikoi in Japanese means rest, relax and relief. And I'm thinking, what a wonderful name for her little place. I used to stop there so often after work to rest and relax. Now I had this relief, you know, in knowing that these disasters didn't take her, that she was alive. And then finally, on February 19, 2012, Mrs. Iwata SAN sends me a letter. I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pelateri San, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seem to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won't be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you. Adiato. Cause I must.
- [18:05]
Dan Kennedy
Carle Piloteri spent the last 30 years servicing electrical generating stations around the world. He now owns Penghu County Wind Energy Company installing residential sized wind turbines in the archipelago off the western coast of Taiwan where he lives now with his wife and two children. This week marks the three year anniversary of the tragic events in Fukushima. And the area over there where Carl was living, you know, during his story is still an exclusion zone. And when he went back there for the last time, he said his neighborhood was completely unrecognizable. There were cracks in the sidewalk. Still dogs and cattle were roaming the streets. And he was saying it's hard to imagine that anyone will be able to return to living in that area again in his lifetime. We'd like to give special thanks to Mary Beth Kirchner and Alex Chadwick from Burn and Energy Journal. They introduced Carl to the Moth and encouraged him to share his story on the Moth main stage. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com getting your mailing and shipping done can seem like a trade off. The post office can take too much time. Postage meter is too expensive. But there's a better way. Stamps.com with stamps.com you get official US postage for any letter or package using your own computer and printer. Save up to 80% compared to a post postage meter and avoid trips to the post office. And right now, listeners of the Moth podcast get a special offer including free postage. So go to stamps.com click on the microphone and type in moth that's stamps.com and use the code Moth. This podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com Squarespace gives you an all in one platform to create a professional website or online portfolio in just a few minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, head to squarespace.com and use the offer code themoth2 and thanks again to squarespace.com for supporting us here at the Moth. And here's some news for our listeners in Ireland. Our Artistic director Kathryn Burns and our producing director Sarah Austin Jeuness are both going to be discussing storytelling with the folks at Sounds Alive. And that's going to happen on March 22nd at Freemasons hall in Dublin. You can get your tickets@soundsoutloud.com Our podcast.
- [20:29]
Carl Piliteri
Host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit. Available now.
- [20:37]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.