NC.
I'll recount this story but it's upsetting so please don't read on if the story of someone in a severe earthquake is particularly distressing for you.
My late partner was in the Kobe earthquake in Japan in January 1995. I didn't know her then but she told me quite a bit about it.
She felt a significant foreshock the night before and reported it to the authorities who denied it had happened. She beseeched them to listen to her but they dismissed her as a confused Brit with a bit of culture shock.
She was in a relatively safe place when the impact hit so she survived when almost 5000 around her died. She remembered being thrown across the room, opening her eyes and wondering if this was the afterlife.
She went out into the streets and saw stacks of dead people, body parts etc. She found one man looking for his son and he found bits of him and went insane in front of her. She tried to help injured people, wrapping with makeshift bandages etc. The water was off and she realised she had other people's blood all over her hands. Her workplace had a stock of vodka and she got that and used it to wash her hands. That was her strongest memory, washing her hands in vodka.
One colleague was away working but his heavily pregnant wife had remained in Kobe. She was in shock and the baby stopped moving and my partner got her to hospital. I know that to get them there she stole cars and drove them until the petrol ran out, then stole another. She had been in the Gun Club at university and there were firearms available. She made comments about "doing what needed to be done." I never actually asked her if she killed anyone to protect her colleague's wife (or indeed, put anyone out of their misery) but I can't help but wonder. (Colleague's wife survived, baby is now over 30.)
We once saw a clip of a similar event on the news (her family and I always tried to screen them, if we saw a news report we'd distract her from the TV for the rest of the day, but this just appeared without warning) and the news reporter was discussing how the relief agencies were trying to help. I remember she said to me "In my experience the relief agencies are crap, it's the organised criminals who are the best help."
She was working for a UK university and they arranged to get her out. Flew her to Charles de Gaulle then on to Heathrow. She had a breakdown on the flight and started taking her clothes off and trying to use them to bandage passengers people on the plane thinking they were the victims in need. She carried on doing that round Oxford when she got back, her parents were ringing the Dons to try and get her psychological help.
She insisted on returning to help with the relief effort. Apparently she kept saying she would go back as soon as the water was back on and she did. I don't think she really remembered the initial repatriation to the UK and she felt she'd abandoned all the people there. She had tremendous survivor guilt. She used to get randomly angry and say "They should have listened to me the night before" in the middle of a normal conversation even 20 years later. She also used to see fires that weren't there. I never really understood how PTSD (which she was diagnosed with) transports people back to times of trauma, but having witnessed it, I realised she wasn't just remembering it, she thought she was re-living it in that moment in her British living room.
It ruined her life. She carried on at Oxford and other universities but she was never really fully functional again. She died of alcoholism almost 24 years later. Fundamentally she never got over the trauma.