SURVIVAL IN NIIGATA

Just watching on tv a 'small' real-life drama amidst the earthquake and ongoing tremors in Niigata, searchers having found a mother and her two small children listed as missing for five days, the husband-father beginning at last to accept the fact of their death and then they were found-- alive, trapped in their car beneath what looks alike a whole mountainside of car-sized boulders that wiped out the road they were riding on, trapped them there upside down in the crushing dark for five days, unimaginable anguish for them, and for the father, what they and he must have been feeling day and night, the mother shouting out there in the middle of nowhere for five days, unheard and unreachable as road impassable, finally was heard by searchers, and rescuers began the extremely delicate process of making an opening and extracting the three from the teetering slope of boulders with another tremor possible any second; drama can never equal that of real life; they are all safe now, and the husband is stunned by his good fortune, numb with the fact of his blessing... may blessings be on all suffering there...

[Update: apparently only the 2-year-old boy and the mother have been rescued thus far; the 3-year-old girl may still be in the mud-filled car and can't be gotten out, or she may not be in the car at all anymore, they can't tell; rescuers must leave for the night, the danger being greatly heightened by the falling darkness...]