Tokyo street 'rippling like water'

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Tokyo street 'rippling like water': "

Jarrod Lentz

A photo of the large mushroom cloud Lentz saw after he heard a huge explosion across Tokyo Bay.

By Miranda Leitsinger, Senior Writer and Editor, msnbc.com

For Jarrod Lentz, his first quake experience was something out of a Hollywood film: cracking pavement, rocky liquid bubbling up from the street, a blast, a mushroom cloud shooting into the air, and one aftershock after another.

“Initially, I was a little excited,” he said. But the quake continued to build and at 45 seconds, “I could no longer stand upright in my room. I was sort of forced to get down on my knees.”

He said he wasn’t sure how long it lasted, though “it felt like forever,” and he felt the building “bend.” Like being on a cruise ship in rough seas, it made him nauseous.

Lentz, who was on the seventh floor of a Tokyo building, fled through outdoor stairs. “The sidewalk and street looked like they were rippling like water. They were kind of moving against each other, too, so the sidewalk had broken away from the street. It was significantly moving, so much so that it was hard to even mentally comprehend what I was seeing.”

Jarrod Lentz

Liquefaction and cracked pavement outside Lentz's Tokyo apartment complex.

As the quake rumbled, a dark gray, quicksand-like material oozed up from the cracks in the street, said Lentz, a 29-year-old singer at Tokyo Disneyland who originally hails from near Hershey, Penn. He just moved to Tokyo eight days ago. 

Jarrod Lentz

A displaced manhole cover on the streets of Tokyo.

“You’re hearing concrete ripping; you’re seeing a sidewalk rise up three feet … The only way your brain can sort of process the information at the moment is just like, ‘this is like I am in a disaster movie,’” he said.

Streets were flooding and water was coming up out of the drains. Street lamps tilted from their base. At one point, there was a “massive” explosion that sent a “mushroom cloud” into the sky, he said, noting it was unclear what that was from.

“All of the sudden, the sky just lit up very quickly … [a] gigantic fireball rose up into the sky, right across this water inlet.”

Lentz and others fleeing the quake first waited in a courtyard and then went to wait out the aftershocks in a local middle school. He returned home, but he said the building was still shaking every 7-15 minutes.

“There is just this sinking feeling every single time [there is an aftershock]. … I really want this to be over. I want something to come back to normal, but right now nothing is normal,” he said, noting residents had been warned there could be another big quake. “So that goes through your mind every time the building shakes. … I’ve got my shoes on; I’ve got a bag packed by the door, just in case, because I just don’t know anymore.”

The sidewalk in front of Lentz'a apartment building. He said it was displaced by about two feet.

Lentz has been tweeting about his experience. Follow him here: http://twitter.com/#!/JarrodLentz 

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