WAJIMA, Ishikawa Prefecture—For nearly half a day, firefighters battling the earthquake-triggered inferno that destroyed the Wajima Asaichi market here found themselves short of their main weapon: water.

The Noto Peninsula earthquake on New Year’s Day that caused the fire also created conditions that made it difficult and even impossible for firefighters to control the blaze in the early stages.

The flames quickly spread at the market, popular tourist attraction featuring local seafood, vegetables and crafts. An estimated 48,000 square meters burned in the blaze.

FIRE HYDRANT FLATTENED

At 4:10 p.m. on Jan. 1, the magnitude-7.6 quake struck, and a tsunami warning was issued.

Kazuma Futo, 65, who runs a Wajima-nuri lacquerware workshop at the market, rushed with his wife to a three-story shelter about 200 meters away.

About 30 minutes later, Futo returned home to retrieve valuables. He smelled smoke.

He saw plumes emerging in an area about 100 meters from his workshop.

Futo, a former member of a neighborhood fire brigade, grabbed a hose and tried to connect it to a fire hydrant at a nearby temple.

However, the hydrant had been flattened by debris in the quake.

The fire grew stronger, and Futo could feel the heat as flames approached a cylinder containing gas. He saw pale blue-white flames dancing in the air and then heard a few “bangs.”

Futo returned to the shelter after active members of the fire brigade arrived on the scene.

“The fire was small at first,” Futo recalled. “If only we could have used the fire hydrant, we might have been able to extinguish the fire in the initial stages.”

RIVER WATER DEPLETED

Tatsuyuki Hosobata, 59, a commander of the Wajima city fire brigade’s Wajima division, was busy guiding residents to higher ground after the tsunami warning was issued.

Just before 6 p.m., Hosobata saw red flames rising from houses around Asaichi-dori street. He then received a call from the fire department to “mobilize immediately.”

Hosobata headed toward the fire, running along cracked and sunken roads.

Two fire trucks from his division took a detour to get closer to the fire, which had already spread to several houses on both sides of the road.

The morning market area is sandwiched between a river to the west and the sea to the north.

Although firewater tanks were available there, it was the common understanding of firefighters to use river water or sea water to extinguish blazes in the market.

However, because of the tsunami warning on Jan. 1, the fire department instructed Hosobata’s team to avoid the coast and park the trucks along the river.

They sucked up water from the river, but the liquid emerging from the hoses soon turned to mud and finally to sand.

Hosobata looked at the river and saw that it had dried up.

He thought the water had been depleted because of the ebb tide of the tsunami.

“But now when I think of it, the ground may have risen (because of the quake) and the river water stopped flowing,” he said.

Hosobata and fire brigade members decided to use the two nearby firewater tanks. But one was already engulfed in flames, and the other was emptied in less than 30 minutes.

By then, a strong southerly wind began to blow. The fire spread north and closed in on the main street of the morning market.

BACKUP BLOCKED

Kaoru Mizuguchi, 45, a member of the Wajima city fire brigade’s Kawarada division, and three colleagues were on a fire truck that was transporting injured people to a hospital in the city center near the morning market.

The entire area was dark due to a power outage, but the sky was tinged orange from flames about 5 kilometers away from his location.

“What the heck is that?” he wondered.

As the fire truck approached the city center, he realized what was going on. “This is terrible,” Mizuguchi said.

At around 7 p.m., Mizuguchi dropped off the injured at the hospital and headed for Kawai Elementary School, located about 500 meters southeast of the likely starting point of the fire.

He took out a loaded hose, pumped water out of the school’s pool, and began to discharge water.

However, there were not enough fire trucks to fight the spreading inferno.

The firefighters branched their hoses to simultaneously strike at several spots in the fire, but that maneuver weakened the water pressure.

Mizuguchi turned on a nearby fire hydrant, but no water came out.

A lacquerware shop nearby was burning fiercely, and the heat forced Mizuguchi to retreat.

According to the fire emergency medical service headquarters that covers the greater Okunoto area, Wajima city has a fire department, two fire stations, and 16 fire brigades with a total of 23 fire trucks.

On the evening of Jan. 1, only six of the fire trucks were able to arrive at the Wajima Asaichi market.

The fire department had called for dispatches of fire trucks closer to the city center and also asked for support from other municipalities and the prefecture.

However, roads were cut off in many areas, and it was difficult for the trucks and workers to reach the scene.

FIREFIGHTERS FACED ‘TRIPLE WHAMMY’

Masakatsu Nakaura, 60, who runs a confectionery store that has been in business for 114 years at the market, was in an evacuation center set up at Wajima Junior High School, about 1 km away, when heard about the fire.

He put on a jacket and rushed to the site at around 9 p.m.

He stood about 50 meters east of the flames and thought that his store was already burning. He prayed for the fire to “stop right here.”

He saw about five firefighters trying to extinguish the fire. One firefighter was holding a hose that was limp.

“If there was water pressure, the hose wouldn’t bend like that, and two people should have been holding it,” Nakaura said he thought at the time.

By 1 a.m. on Jan. 2, it was clear that Nakaura’s prayers for the fire to stop had not been answered.

The fire was approaching houses facing the sea on the northernmost side of the market. The pool at Kawai Elementary School was empty.

By this time, the tsunami warning had been downgraded to a tsunami advisory, and firefighters were instructed to pump up seawater.

The use of seawater increased the force of the water coming from the hoses.

Firefighters worked through the night.

By 7:30 a.m., the fire had slowed considerably, but it was not completely extinguished. It took an additional 100 or more hours to completely douse all of the flames.

Mizuguchi continued his firefighting activities until around 10 p.m. on Jan. 2.

He said he was nervous about fighting the fire during a tsunami warning.

“If (the buildings) were swept away by the tsunami, there might be things that could be found afterward,” he said. “But if they were burned down, there would be nothing left. I just wanted to stop the fire.”

From the evacuation center, Futo, who has been involved in lacquer work at the market for 40 years, watched his workshop and his neighbors’ houses and businesses burn to the ground.

“I feel like everything that the Wajima-nuri craftsmen have built, and all my precious memories, have been burned away,” Futo said. “It’s so frustrating.”

Ai Sekizawa, a professor of urban disaster mitigation studies at the Tokyo University of Science, said that securing water is the most important factor in preventing the spread of fires caused by earthquakes.

In the case of the Wajima market fire, the situation was a “triple whammy,” Sekizawa said.

Fire hydrants could not be used due to the water supply being cut off, the river water was depleted, and the ocean was considered off-limits because of the tsunami warning.

“It must have been extremely difficult to conduct firefighting activities under these conditions,” he said.

(This article was written by Rikuri Kuroda and Yunisu Mahar.)