Japanese teenager rescued with 80 yr old grandmother after 9 nine days in wreckage

Mtoday News / Mail

Japan, March 20: A teenager rescued from the rubble of Japan’s monster earthquake has spoken of spending nine days trapped inside the wreckage of him home unable to alert rescuers outside.

Jin Abe and his 80-year-old grandmother Sumi were in the kitchen on the top floor of a two-storey wooden house in Ishinomaki when the 9-magnitude earthquake struck.

The building collapsed with both inside, but the 16-year-old was able to reach blankets, food and drink, and keep them both alive for more than a week.



Survivor: Jin Abe, 16, recovers in his hospital bed after he was pulled from the wreckage of his home nine days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Ishinomaki

Speaking from his hospital bed in the devastated city, Jin said: ’We heard people outside but we couldn’t escape.

’We found some water and snacks, so we ate them.’

Jin described being trapped inside a crawl space the ’size of a room’, unable to stand up or walk around.

He had wrapped his grandmother in the blankets to keep her warm as temperatures plummeted, while he made do with towels.

 

Saved: Sumi Abe’s grandson gave her the blankets to keep her warm and she was largely unhurt after the earthquake struck

 

Life-saver: Jin is carried on to a helicopter and flown to the Red Cross Hospital in Ishinomaki, where he was suffering from hypothermia

’A great man’: Akira Abe, Jin’s father, said he never gave up hope his son was still alive

Finally, he managed to claw through the rubble and call out to rescue teams combing the earthquake and tsunami zone and he was airlifted to hospital along with his grandmother.

Jin was suffering from hypothermia, but his grandmother was found to have been largely unhurt after she was trapped underneath furniture that had fallen on top of her.

He said: ’I’m glad we survived.’

The boy’s father Akira said he had never given up hope of seeing his son again.

He said: ’We all believed they were alive somewhere. He doesn’t talk much, but I always thought he was a great man.

’This time he really proved it.’

Their dramatic rescue has offered a glimmer of hope to relatives desperately searching for missing loved ones after the double disaster.

Government spokesman Yukio Edano said: ’I feel stunned that the two people survived in really difficult conditions for such a long time.

’This miraculous news is very encouraging for people affected by the disasters.’

The pair had survived on food in the refrigerator and a little water. There was no mobile phone signal so Jin waited patiently before deciding that he had to try and get a message to the outside world.

Troops on Saturday announced they had found a man thought to have spent eight days in a half-destroyed house, but it later turned out he was an evacuee who had returned to his home.