AP Photo/Evrim Aydin, Anatolia

Rescuers search for survivors in the rubble of a collapsed hotel in Van, eastern Turkey, late Wednesday.

By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent

LONDON – The pictures and video of the collapsed Bamyan Hotel in Van, Turkey, where at least eight were killed overnight by a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, were particularly eerie for me.

The victims were mostly the rescuers and journalists covering the aftermath of a previous, deadlier 7.2 magnitude quake that struck on Oct. 23 dozens of miles away. Worse – they had been told they’d be safe there.

As sniffer dogs and frantic first responders found and dug out at least 26 survivors – one died later in the hospital – I flashed back to September, 1985.

We were a group of about a dozen NBC News personnel who had just arrived in Mexico City to cover the destruction left by a massive 8.1 earthquake. Hundreds of buildings had collapsed, and thousands of people were killed. But we felt relatively secure on the 14th floor of the five-Star Marriott Hotel. We’d been assured that the building was “earthquake proof” and had only suffered “minor damage.”

And that’s just what the Bamyan Hotel staff had said to journalists after Turkey’s initial Oct. 23 quake that toppled at least 2,000 buildings and killed some 600 people.

“There’s no structural damage here,” one Turkish journalist said he had been told.

It sounded so familiar.

Ali Ihsan Ozturk / Andolu Agency via EPA

Rescue workers try to salvage people from a collapsed building after an earthquake in Van, eastern of Turkey, on Thursday. Click on the photo to see a complete slideshow.

Minutes into our first meeting to talk about the next day’s coverage, the floor started to shake. We all fell silent. Looking up, a hanging lamp banged against the ceiling as it swayed in 180-degree arcs. Someone said, “Uh oh.” Someone else stifled a scream. Then we felt the whole building begin to sway. It didn’t feel like it would stop. I didn’t believe it would stop. It was like a huge rollercoaster you have lost trust in. We were going to die. 

But it did stop – and then began to sway backwards. More screams. And then sounds I can still hear – tons of screeching metal. And then more screams.

I ran – we ran – down what seemed like endless flights of stairs, yelling as much to myself as to the others, “Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic!!”

Amazingly, we got to what we thought was the ground floor and burst through the door. But it wasn’t the ground floor – we had rushed out onto the second-floor mezzanine garden. It was nighttime, but, silhouetted against the sky, I could see the outline of the hotel tower as it continued swaying.

More screeching metal. And then the realization came that we had to go back into the hotel, find the stairs in the dark, and get out to the street.

Which, with our hearts in our mouths, we did.

The Marriott survived that 7.8 aftershock. The staff who had said it was safe were – just barely – correct.
But none of us that September night dared go back into the building to grab any personal belongings.

This was years before it became standard for news teams to travel with tents, flashlights, water bottles and ponchos when covering an earthquake story – especially in a large metropolis like Mexico City. We were hardly prepared at all.

Hours later, and still very shaken, we checked into the Camino Real. It had one major thing going for it – it was only two or three stories tall.

Looking at the images of devastation in Van, it was obvious that the standards used in building the Mexico City Marriott were not applied. The Bamyan didn’t stand a chance against the 5.7 aftershock. Turkish government officials have complained for years about the rickety state of Turkey’s hotels and other buildings. But builders still cut corners. Some reporters staying at the Bamyan said they’d seen “small cracks” after October’s massive quake.

“I could easily put my hand through the cracks in the walls,” laughed NBC News cameraman Dave Moodie in the typical gallows style of a hardened journalist. Moodie had stayed at the Bamyan for a week while covering the worst-hit town, Ercis.

It is, of course, no laughing matter. He was shocked to see the hotel on TV this morning, flattened like a pancake.

And I will never forget those minutes in that Mexico Marriott – to this day I HATE to stay in any hotel room above the second floor.

Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent based in London. 

 By Miranda Leitsinger, Senior Writer and Editor, msnbc.com

One image says it all: A stopped clock at an elementary school in the hamlet of Kitakami on Japan’s devastated northern coast reading 2:46 – the moment when a powerful 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11.

The Yoshihama school in Kitakami is now a scene of unbelievable destruction after being shredded by the waves. What is left of the school is surrounded by a debris field of overturned, smashed up trucks, some jammed one on top of another, and mangled metal from what was a branch office of the Ishinomaki city government.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

Destroyed by the tsunami, small trucks called "Kei trucks," are stacked on the side of the road in Kitakami, Japan. The wave was 7-meters tall (almost 23 feet) when it slammed into the town's city office, left, and elementary school, right.

At least 57 people were in the city offices when tsunami hit and washed over the building, but only two men and a fourth-grade boy survived, even though the building was designated as an emergency evacuation center. Five students and 10 teachers at the Yoshihama school next door went to the roof and survived, the Japanese-language Kahoku newspaper reported.

“Many of the people who were working here and in this area died,” said Tsutomu Abe, 35, a road maintenance worker who was accepting shipments of gravel for a new road in front of the site late Sunday.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

"Many of the people who were working here and in this area died," says Tsutomu Abe, taking a beak from repairing roads in Kitakami, Japan, on Sunday, Abe, 35, is from Tome city, about 12 miles inland.
.

The reconstruction was going well, but a storm last week caused new damage, said Abe, who was not affected by the tsunami and who has signed on for a year of reconstruction work. “I don’t know if I can finish it within one year, or if I can bear to do it for another year because it’s hard work.

“It’s not just physically (tough) but getting the necessary equipment … they don’t have enough people, they don’t have enough tools, gears, to rebuild everything," he said.

The land has also sunk from the quake and floods easily when it rains, he said, noting it could be years before the area is  “fully recovered” and that, even then, parts of the town may never be habitable.

“I don’t know if people can live in this area again,” he said.

Relatives of victims have held a memorial at the city office, and some people return to the site to pray at times, he said.

“It’s two months after the earthquake so I’m used to it, the fact that many people died, but I still have a mixed feeling about working here,” he said. “It’s not negative. I think I have to work, we all have to work, for reconstruction. But I still have a mixed feeling that I can’t describe in words.”  

Nearly three months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami shattered thousands of lives along Japan’s northeastern coast, Kimio Sato, a 63-year-old fisherman, is camped out in the ruins of his home in what was formerly the idyllic town of Kitakami and contemplating a daunting future.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

"I wasn't scared," says fisherman Kimio Sato, seen here with his wife Tomie, standing in what used to be the bedroom of their Kitakami home on Sunday. When the tsunami siren sounded, Kimio got in his fishing boat and headed out to sea. "That's what we do here to protect the boat," Kimio says. "We're fishermen."

We encountered Sato as dusk fell Sunday, sitting on the steps leading to the foundation of his home -- the only part still standing -- and chatting with a neighbor, their conversation accompanied by trilling tree frogs, the cries of passing birds and waves rhythmically crashing against the rocks on the nearby beach.

Speaking through a translator, he seemed fairly positive, given that he and his wife, Tomie, have almost nothing with which they can begin rebuilding their lives. He had spent part of the day using a hook to scrape mud out of a string of weights used to hold down fishing nets.  He found the weights under a car, he said, but that was the only piece of his fishing gear left behind by the giant wave that invaded the village of about 100 residents.

"Anything that could float is gone," he said.

Sato is luckier than some. Four of his neighbors died in the flood, and many lost everything they owned. But Sato was able to save his boat by heading out to sea as soon as the tsunami siren began blaring and sending his wife to safety on a nearby hill.

"If I lose my boat, it's like my hands and feet are cut off, and I can't eat," he said of his decision to try and ride out the giant wave.

When Sato got home, the destruction was worse than he expected.

"I thought that my house would still be there ... when I came back, all I saw was the white concrete on the side of the shore, and I started crying," he said. "What should have been there when I came back was gone."

Now Sato’s life is largely on hold.

His boat is stored in a harbor, and though it's seaworthy, there is nowhere to sell his catch -- typically sea bass, salmon and sole -- since the fish market was wiped out. The local fishing association has put forward some proposals for reopening, but nothing has come of them yet.

So he spends much of his time trying to rebuild his life as a fisherman, working with his bare hands and a few rudimentary tools.

"I'm sure it will happen in time, but right now I have nothing," he said. "All of the things that I had before and I need are gone so I've got to do what I can with what I have."

Sato has built a makeshift den on top of his former home, covered with a blue tarp strung up with a turquoise fishing net. Though there is no electricity, he has a solar-powered light. He proudly shows visitors how he has rigged a natural spring to flow into one of the few structures standing in the area -- the couple's bathhouse. He said he occasionally stays overnight at the den because he wants to be near the sea.

Only a few of the two dozen houses that once made up Kitakami town are still standing, but as shells -- curtains hang out of empty windows in one.

"It certainly hurts," Sato said of the new reality. "It's sad if I think about it, but I try not to think about it and try to forget, and it's just I have to keep moving forward ... and try to keep myself busy and try to work. And even this den, I made this, that's how I am trying to keep myself going."

As we talked, Sato’s wife, 62-year-old Tomie, rode up on a donated bicycle, carrying a dinner of tofu, mountain vegetables, fried squid and rice. "I brought some food for my lovely husband," she said amid laughs and welcomes from Sato and his friend.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

Rolling in with a smile, 62-year-old Tomie Sato parks her bike and brings dinner to her husband, Kimio. Since their Kitakami home was destroyed by the tsunami, the Satos have been living in a nearby shelter, but Kimio sometimes stays in the blue tarp tent he built on the foundation of their home.

Tomie, who is living at a nearby day-care center that has been converted into a shelter, said she focused on being happy, not sad. But she couldn’t help feeling nostalgic as she looked around at the few remaining remnants of their lives -- soda cans, shattered glass, a shoe insert.

"This is where our children grew up," she said of their  three sons and a daughter. "It's completely gone, so I feel like I have to start all over. The one saddest thing is that I lost all my memories, like pictures, albums and the videos from my son's marriage. There is nothing left."

The couple said they might be denied permission by the government to rebuild their home if the area is deemed too dangerous for people to live in. And they’re not even sure they will be able to afford to rebuild. The government will provide them with $24,000 in compensation, but they will have to buy everything else.

"They say lots of things, but they haven't taken much action," Kimio Sato said of the officials’ promises. "The scale of this whole accident is massive, it's too massive, and it will probably take a long time before they get to small villages like mine."

Sato figures it will be another month before he can go out fishing again, and another six months to be completely back in business. He says he could begin making new fishing nets, but they would quickly deteriorate without a place to store them out of the sun.

"The problem is, there are a lot of people in the same situation, who need the same things as I do, which makes it difficult to get those things," he said, noting at one point, “All I have is hope.”

Despite his seemingly upbeat demeanor with visitors, he said there were hard moments.

"I'll be fine as long as there are people around. But I feel very lonely and I might be crying when I am by myself," he said.

The couple has been accepted into public housing in the area, Tomie said, and they could move in within the month. Their children also have asked them to move in with them inland, but Tomie said her husband wants to stay by the sea. Most of their neighbors want to come home, too.

"My husband loves the sea ... and he wants to live near the ocean, so that's why we choose to stay here," she said.  "This is where we want to end."

David Guttenfelder / AP

Pools of water, where once there was a city street, fill a devastated neighborhood in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture, on May 30.

Nearly three months after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan’s northeastern coast, survivors are beginning to imagine a better future.

They are reopening family businesses, planting trees and clearing the debris and sludge from devastated homes. They’re also finding ways to heal themselves and their neighbors, and looking for moments of normalcy amid the ruins. The dual disaster left 15,000 dead, 8,500 missing and more than 100,000 homeless.

Msnbc.com reporter Miranda Leitsinger and multimedia producer Jim Seida are traveling to Japan to chronicle the early moments of this ravaged region’s rebirth, and to meet some of the people who are leading the recovery in small ways – a father-son team who have restarted the family’s electrical construction business from the back of a truck, a woman who runs a nonprofit for disabled kids and members of a children’s jazz ensemble.

We’ll initially be focusing on two hard-hit cities, Kesennuma and Minamisanriku, but will roam elsewhere if we hear of compelling stories that are waiting to be told.

We’re also going to experiment in how we share this story by using social media and giving readers three distinct ways to consume it – in near-real-time dispatches on Facebook; in a more conversational and contextual form using a new social media mash-up called Storify; or in condensed form on msnbc.com’s World Blog.

We’d like you to participate by sharing your thoughts and insights on what Miranda and Jim encounter and by telling them what you’d like to know about the survivors, their struggles and their triumphs. We’ve added Facebook commenting to the World Blog to make it easier for those of you who access the report through that portal.

The journey begins on Saturday. Please join us and invite your friends along for the ride.