Kalispell City Council member dodges quake

Kalispell City Council member Tim Kluesner experienced Japan’s recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake and lived to tell about it.

Kluesner arrived in Tokyo on March 11, the day the massive earthquake struck the island nation. He got a connecting flight to Miyazaki in southern Japan and was in the air when the quake struck. He didn’t feel a thing.

Kluesner had gone to Japan for a friend’s wedding and to visit relatives. His wife Kaori is a native of Japan.

“I dodged a serious bullet,” Kluesner said Monday after Kalispell’s council meeting.

He felt a 6.0 earthquake aftershock while in a Tokyo airport on March 16. “They’re still having them,” he said.

Kluesner, who lived in Japan for nine years, said he was forced to transfer from one Tokyo airport to another while on his return flight. The airport in Tokyo’s Narita prefecture was “packed with people trying to leave the country.”

It was “organized chaos,” he said. Most of those leaving were foreigners.

The Kluesners were scanned by a man with a radiation counter in the Seattle airport upon their return.

All in all, the trip was fairly uneventful, he said.

They encourage relief donations be given to the Japan Red Cross.