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Dock from Japan washes on shore in Oregon beach

June 7, 2012

When a tsunami hit Japan’s northern coast last year, the waves tore four dock floats the size of freight trains from their fishing port of Misawa and turned them over to the currents. One of those docks floated up on a nearby island. Two have never been seen again. And one made an incredible journey across 5,000 miles of ocean to Oregon beach.

After it ran ashore on Tuesday, the Japanese Consulate was able to track down the origin. Deputy Consul Hirofumi Murabayashi said that it was one of four owned by Aomori Prefecture that broke loose from the port of Misawa during the tsunami.

In the dock were hundreds of millions of organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan. Scientists are concerned about these organisms and what might happen if they get a chance to spread out on the U.S. West Coast. Akihisa Sato, an engineer with the dock’s Tokyo-based manufacturer, said the docks were used for loading fish onto trucks.

“This is a very clear threat,” said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “It’s exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It’s going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass. It’s incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next.” Plans were being well thought-out by state authorities to scrape all the living things off the dock and bury them in the sand so they would not spread, Chapman said.

Scientists expected much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, yet tsunami debris that can catch the wind are making their way to North America. Just recently a soccer ball washed up in Alaska and a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a shipping container in British Columbia.
Once the dock float got into the ocean, it was pushed steadily by the prevailing westerly winds, and the North Pacific Current, said Jan Hafner, a computer programmer in the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center. He is tracking the 1.5 million tons of tsunami debris estimated to still be floating across the Pacific.