It was a routine day at Kumamoto General Hospital in Japan. Inside an operating room, doctors and nurses were perched over a patient, performing abdominal surgery. Then the shaking began.
Tables, chairs and medical equipment went flying. Staff members were knocked to the ground. Two doctors clung onto the operating table, trying to protect the patient from the mayhem.
The frantic early moments of a powerful 6.8-magnitude earthquake last week in Kumamoto, a prefecture in southern Japan, were captured by an operating-room camera. The hospital released the video this week.
After the earthquake struck around 4:30 p.m. on July 28, it was “total chaos,” said Shotaro Yoshihara, a spokesman for the hospital.
“Everyone just had to step up and deal with the situation as best they could,” he said in a telephone interview.
At the time of the earthquake, there were four surgeries underway at the hospital. All were completed successfully once the shaking had subsided, Mr. Yoshihara said.
The earthquake killed 38 people and caused the collapse of several hundred buildings in Kumamoto, on Kyushu island, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Yet the region avoided large-scale damage thanks to meticulous planning and tens of billions of dollars in earthquake proofing.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Kumamoto General Hospital faced disruptions to electricity and water, and an influx of injured residents.
The hospital, which has 400 beds, was forced to suspend some services. But it had almost returned to full service by Wednesday.
“It would be a devastating blow if a large-scale hospital like ours were unable to provide care,” Mr. Yoshihara said. “We were all working with our full effort to get operations back up and running quickly.”
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