Japanese earthquake hits home
By Michael Johnson, Editor
An 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a massive tsunami to hit Japan Friday. For those living there with roots to Washburn there is a whole community hoping that they faired well. Two residents of Japan had close ties to Washburn and lived through the nightmare that smashed the coastlines of Japan. Sendai, Japan, is a large city about 80 miles from the epicenter of the quake and one resident, Daniel Eichhorst, is a professor in that city and he has close to ties to Washburn. Amazingly, he was in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the time of the quake and didn’t have to see the damage first-hand. Because the Sendai Airport that Eichhorst uses regularly was completely destroyed he was not able to return to Sendai on the day of the quake. "The earthquake occurred the night before we were scheduled to return to Japan after a short vacation in which we met my brother and his family in Hawaii," Eichhorst said in an e-mail. "We first received information about the earthquake in a text mail from our niece in Tokyo and then were stunned at the image of the tsunami destroying the area around Sendai Airport which we have used many times.
