At
two o’clock the same day (October 1, 2019), the Marine Awaji left Iwaya Port on
Awaji Island and was heading for Akashi Port on the Japanese mainland of Honshu,
crossing the Akashi Strait. There were about 120 passengers on board. It was a
beautiful fine day, and the sea was calm and perfectly flat. The boat was going
to sail under Akashi Channel Bridge on its way and reach its destination in
about 13 minutes.
The
boat approached within 200 meters of the bridge. It was sailing obliquely to
the bridge. The passengers looked up at the overwhlemingly huge bridge that
towered before their eyes. The two skyscraping towers with a distance of 2000
meters between them suspended about 4000-meter-long bridge beam with cables and
hangers. Both towers were nearly as high as the Eiffel Tower. The two cables
attached at the top of one of the towers ran to the top of the other tower in a
graceful parabola form.
Suddenly,
the sky became dark and the sea ran high. The boat began to rock violently. The
passengers, screaming desperately, clung to the tables and poles. The juice
cans and plastic bottles on the tables fell onto the cabin floor and rolled to
and fro. The bags on the floor slid to the side of the boat. Surprisingly, vortexes
more than 100 meters in diameter appeared ahead of the ship.
The passengers heard the captain say over the intercom, “This is the captain speaking! Put
on the life jackets! Put on the life jackets immediately! Huge vortexes ahead
of us. We will turn back to Iwaya Port!”
The
screw reversed at full speed, but the boat failed to stop and advanced toward
the vortexes. The ship was in chaos with the passengers’ screams and the
children’s cries.
“Look!
The bridge is…,” a passenger clinging to the deck bench shouted.
The
tower in front of the boat was slanting extremely to the left, while the
distant tower was tipping to the right. The bridge beam was wildly swaying left
and right. Several vehicles hit the guard rail, bounced over it, and fell into
the sea.
At
last the tower fell into the rough sea, raising tremendous spray high up in the
air, and then sank pulling down all the cables and hangers with it. The next
moment, the other tower nearly fell into the sea. The center of the beam
twisted like a ribbon. In no time, the beams on the left and right snapped like
small branches and fell into the sea. Dozens vehicles slid into the sea.
Within
a few minutes, almost entire bridge sank and disappeared in the sea.
The
Marine Awaji managed to make a U-turn before being caught in the vortexes. Now
it was heading for Iwaya Port. The mountainous ripples formed by the falling
bridge reached the boat and shook it hard. Nevertheless, the ship successfully
reached the port.
Landing
at the pier, the passengers looked back at the sea, where they saw no bridge. When
they looked further at Akashi Port on the other side of the strait, they couldn’t
believe what they saw. They saw an extraordinary natural phenomenon: the land
where Akashi City situated was gradually rising upwards. It was not Akashi City
alone that was rising, Kobe City and other cities on the opposite side of the
strait were moving upward vertically. In fact, all the land on the other side
of the sea was rising, producing a low heavy noise similar to the rumble of
distant thunder. The upheaval formed hundreds of kilometers of sheer cliff. The
seawater was falling to the sea from the rising cliff, producing a long belt of
mist at the bottom of the cliff. The land continued to thrust upwards. It was
rising up and up . . . 100 meters . . . 200 . . . 400 . . . 800 . . . 1,600 . .
. . And at last, an unbelievable thing occurred! After rising 2,000 meters, the
land began to float above the sea. It continued to rise up and up in the air.
The
submerged bridge beam appeared from the sea as the land rose in the air. The
beam together with the cables and hangers was hanging down from the rising land
like a rope ladder.
It
was 2:22 in the afternoon.
To
be continued
