The massive amount of Japanese tsunami debris that's been out floating in the Pacific for the last two years continues to hit the West Coast, and today the Chron brings us the story of a fishing boat that recently washed up, well weathered and upside down, on a Del Norte County beach. Tons more debris has been found and connected to the tsunami, but there's some bizarrely tedious process that must be gone through to "verify" if a thing covered in Japanese writing actually came from Japan, so they're saying this boat may be "the first" item to wash up on the California coast, now two years later.
You'll recall that almost exactly a year ago this Japanese teenager's soccer ball washed up in Alaska, and the giant "garbage patch" of debris was shown to be headed for the West Coast a year ago February.
Anyway, the boat had a registration sticker on it, belonging to Takata High School Boat Club, rescue. Tataka is a city of 23,000 on Japan's coast, and an estimated 10% of the population there, or 2,300 people died in the tsunami. Lori Dengler, a geology professor at Humboldt State University who studies tsunamis, contacted someone in Tataka who confirmed the origins of the boat oh, but the Japanese consulate and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have not yet made the verification "official."
In all, some 1,700 items have washed ashore that are likely tsunami debris, but the Japanese consulate has only verified 25 of them.
