Facebook helps couple reunite

[Bashiir]

As the earth shook and the waves crashed against Japan's coast, Nick Cacciato could only fear for friends separated by the disaster.

 

Cacciato was among the local residents Friday who watched in horror as a massive earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan. As cities even outside the quake's epicentre shook, he caught glimpses online of his friends, Detroit man Duane Cavalier and his wife Maho, of Japan, trying to find each other over Facebook.

 

She was in Tokyo and he in Saitama, outside the Japanese capital, he said.

 

"Their only way of communicating is Facebook, so they were Facebooking back and forth," he said.

 

The two were a distance from the heart of the magnitude-8.9 quake which struck off Japan's northeast coast.

 

The quake unleashed a massive tsunami upon the island nation. Media r eports say 1,300 are believed dead.

 

The quake is the most powerful in recorded history to shake Japan, a nation known for its seismic activity. Italy's National Institute of Geophysics said the tremor was so strong, it shifted the earth's axis about 25 centimetres.

 

Communicating with a Star reporter by Facebook, Maho Cavalier said she felt the quake in Tokyo, hours from the epicentre.

 

At first, she said, people dismissed it. But the shaking grew and grew. "I felt the ground was moving and I could not stay still," she said.

 

The tremors didn't damage Tokyo heavily, she said, but the trains shut down, stranding Duane, who runs an English conversation school, in Saitama. Her cellphone and land line didn't work. But somehow the Internet on her iPhone did.

 

When she checked Duane's Facebook, she found him doing the same for her. She said he stayed in Saitama overnight.

 

"It was a horrific event, but we were very lucky in Tokyo," she said.

 

Cacciato said Maho, an animal activist, made it home safely.

 

"I'm just trying to put myself in their shoes right now, is what I'm doing," he said.

 

When he first heard of the quakes, Cacciato, who taught in Japan for two and a half years, said he was stunned. He said other friends in Japan made it through the quake all right, "but needless to say we're completely concerned."

 

It was an anxious Friday for area resident Jessica Pringle. Her friend, 21-year-old Simon Lacombe of Toronto, is in the Japanese city of Kyoto, learning to speak the language.

 

Late Friday, 17-year-old Pringle said she got word from Lacombe he was alive but shaken. But going much of the day without word left her glued to her television set, watching for a ray of hope.

 

"It's just everyone on edge," Pringle said. "I'm watching everything trying to find a slight glimpse (that) everything's OK in that area."

 

The devastation struck with Lacombe just over a month into his Japanese trip, which Pringle said she and her friends arranged for him for Christmas.

 

"All of us, really, are really into Japan and Japanese culture," she said. "We really wanted to go there."

 

Pringle said she heard the news on her way to work and thought of Lacombe.

 

"I just immediately picked up my cell and sent him a text saying, 'Hey, are you OK? Let me know,'" she said. But there was no word until Friday evening, leaving Lacombe's friends in Windsor and Toronto anxious.

 

Cacciato said he's been trying to imagine how hectic it is as Japan faces the aftermath of the disaster.

 

"I have a lot of friends there and I'm worried about them," he said. "I'd like to help in some way but I'm not sure if I can."

 

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