By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A football that bobbed onto the shore of a
remote Alaska island is likely the first salvageable debris from last year’s Japanese tsunami that could be returned to its
owner, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska is seen in this undated handout photo by the NOAA released on April 22, 2012. Misaki
Murakami, 16, from Rikuzentakata in Japan's Iwate prefecture, has come forward as the owner of the ball. According to
Japanese media, Murakami was given the ball by friends, whose names are signed on the ball, when he was in elementary school.
The ball was swept away from his home during the March 11 tsunami, Murakami told local media. REUTERS/NOAA/David
Baxter/Handout
The ball, found on Alaska’s
Middleton Island, bears writing that identifies its place of origin, said Doug Helton, operations coordinator for NOAA’s
Office of Response and Restoration, which is tracking debris from the tsunami.
According to a translation provided by
Tokyo-based journalists, the ball is from the Osabe School in the Iwate Prefecture, an area that was hit by the devastating
tidal wave unleashed March 11 by the magnitude 9 earthquake off Japan’s northeastern coast, Helton said
Sunday.
Beachcombers and cleanup workers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest have found debris, including sports
equipment, that was likely set adrift by the tsunami, Helton said. But this soccer ball stood out because it had identifying
information.
The ball was found by David Baxter, a technician at a radar station on Middleton Island, a remote site in
the Gulf of Alaska.
“We’re working with the guy who found it and the State Department and the consulate in Seattle to
set up a process” to return the ball, Helton said.
Middleton Island, once the site of a Cold War-era Air Force
station, is located about 75 miles southwest of the Prince William Sound village of Cordova. The treeless island is largely
uninhabited, except for the radar station, which is used by the Federal Aviation Administration, and as a seasonal research
camp for federal biologists.
In Alaska, beach cleanup crews on the lookout for tsunami debris have found mostly floats
and buoys from Japanese oyster farms. It can be difficult to determine whether Japanese items found washed up are from the
tsunami or just part of the normal marine flotsam that accumulates every year, Helton said.
One other piece of tsunami
debris with an owner positively identified by NOAA was an abandoned fishing vessel found adrift off Alaska earlier this month
and sunk April 5 by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The 170-foot Ryou-Un Maru, which had been scheduled to be scrapped by its
owner prior to the tsunami, was considered a navigational hazard after it meandered an estimated 4,500 miles (7,242 km) in
the North Pacific from a port in Hokkaido, according to the Coast Guard.
Salvage of the ship was considered too costly
and difficult, and the owner did not want the vessel returned, the Coast Guard and NOAA said. A Coast Guard cutter crew
scuttled the vessel in the Gulf of Alaska.
(Editing by Steve Gorman and Greg McCune; Desking by Stacey Joyce)