The first wave of terror struck shortly before 3 p.m. on a Friday.
"The ground, the thing that doesn't move, was moving," recalled Tomoko Sudo, who was at work when the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake hit Japan last year. "It felt like it was a living creature."
Then the second shock hit: She couldn't reach family members for days in some of the hardest-hit regions in the disaster that caused some 16,000 deaths. So Sudo, 28, turned to Google's Person Finder, which the company's engineers had up and running within two hours after the shaking stopped.
The service, created after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, is a tool to help track down the missing after a disaster.
When the earth convulsed that March day, the Internet was for millions of Japanese the only link to critical information and to one another. Google, Twitter, Cisco Systems and other technology companies were thrust into the role of technological first responders, underscoring a new dimension to the services offered by Silicon Valley tech companies as the Internet becomes ubiquitous
and is often more reliable than other communications systems.
One by one, Sudo tracked down loved ones, including a cousin whose house was swept away by the tsunami. She said she was "shivering" with joy as she got word that they were all right.
This help, said Gisli Olafsson, emergency response director at NetHope, a nonprofit that promotes collaboration between major tech companies and global aid organizations, is worth much more than corporate cash donations.
"You have really smart people working on really difficult problems," Olafsson said. "That becomes extremely valuable."
Google employees, themselves shaken up by the quake and their inability to reach family members, immediately set about deploying services for a traumatized nation from the company's Tokyo high-rise headquarters. Some worked on their laptops throughout the night.
"It was all about the crisis, all about finding people," said Hiroya Isa, a marketing manager at Google Japan.
In addition to revving up Person Finder, engineers worked to publish data on traffic problems, road damage and train delays on Google Maps.
"Tens of thousands of people were walking along the streets," recalled Ryan Falor, a Mountain View-based engineer
who worked around the clock after the quake hit to assist his colleagues in Japan. "We did not know why roads were blocked but we knew cars were not moving."
While Google Maps helped Japanese navigate through the disaster zone, Twitter became the de facto communication tool for many. Unable to make phone calls, Japanese sent tweets to each other because Internet networks -- while at times slow -- were up and running.
Masahiko Inami, a professor of media design at Keio University in Tokyo, relied on Twitter and Google Maps to make his way home by foot, finally arriving at 3 a.m. "Social media is very robust in dangerous situations," he said.
U.S. Ambassador John Roos used Twitter to communicate with Americans in Japan during the disaster and, upon learning of about 80 people trapped in a hospital, alerted authorities, who assisted them. "It was incredibly effective," he said of Twitter.
Cisco Systems, meanwhile, sent in networking gear and other equipment that was deployed in and around the worst-hit areas, establishing instant service for emergency personnel.
