Sports gear washing up on Alaska beach may be first of Japanese tsunami debris
By MIKE DUNHAM
McClatchy Newspapers
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Two sports balls from Japan may be the first positively identified items from the Japan tsunami of March 2011 to reach Alaska shores. According to an April 19 online notice from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Response and Restoration, a soccer ball and volleyball were found on the beach of Middleton Island by David Baxter, a technician at the radar site on the remote island in the Gulf of Alaska.
Baxter noticed Japanese writing stenciled on the balls. His wife translated the writing on the soccer ball and traced it to the name of a school. NOAA confirmed that the school was in the tsunami zone, though located uphill and not seriously damaged by the disaster.
"We're partly getting things secondhand," said Doug Helton, with NOAA offices in Seattle. "We're working with the State Department and the government of Japan."
NOAA thinks this could be one of the first times anything washed away during the tsunami has been sufficiently identified as to make it possible to return it to its owner. It's definitely the first such to be retrieved in Alaska, Helton said.
"There have been other items that were suspected, but this is the first one that we're aware of that has the credentials that may make it possible to positively identify it."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/21/2761239/sports-gear-washing-up-on-alaska.html#storylink=cpy
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