Huge Tsunami Dock Lands on Oregon Beach

 

     

 A huge floating dock cast adrift by Japan's killer tsunami has washed up on an Oregon beach, believed to be the biggest pieces of flotsam to make landfall on the US West Coast so far.The 66-foot long rectangular structure, made of concrete and metal, was spotted floating off the coast on Monday, and then washed in with the high tide on Agate beach, 160 km southwest of Portland.

The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department (OPRD) contacted Japanese diplomats, who confirmed that it was from the March 11, 2011 tsunami, and had drifted 8,850 kilometres across the Pacific over the last 15 months. Hirofumi Murabayashi, deputy consul general at Japan's consulate in Portland, said: "Four floating docks were washed away by the tsunami. This is one of them.

"The other three... we don't know where they are, if they're floating somewhere or they sank in the ocean or not," he said.

Confirmation that the dock came from the tsunami came after Japanese writing and markings were found on various parts of the seaweed-covered dock, including "Shibata, Japan" on tires, apparently designed to make it buoyant. An OPRD spokesman said the dock was bigger than either a trawler scuttled off Alaska in April for safety reasons before reaching land, or a shipping container with a Harley-Davidson inside on a Canada beach at the start of May.

Various debris from the Japanese tsunami have begun washing up on the US and Canadian west coast, and experts predict a surge of flotsam in the coming months. Japanese officials confirmed that the dock – 66 feet long, 19 feet wide and 7 feet tall – came from the port of Misawa, in Aomori Prefecture in the northern part of Japan. The metal plaque was dated June 2008.

Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists concerned if they get a chance to spread out on the West Coast.

"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore., where the dock washed up early Tuesday. "... It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."

A dozen volunteers scraped the dock clean of marine organisms and sterilized it with torches Thursday to prevent the spread of invasive species, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the state Department of Parks and Recreation, which is overseeing the dock's fate. The volunteers removed a ton and a half of material from the dock, and buried it above the high-water line, Havel said.

Biologists have identified one species of seaweed, known as wakame, that is native to Japan and has established in Southern California but has not yet been seen in Oregon, he said. While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tons of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America. In recent weeks, a soccer ball washed up in Alaska, and a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a shipping container was found in British Columbia, Canada.