Google Street View Shows Fukushima Disaster Ghost Town

Following a request from the town's mayor, Google Street View sent a car to the now-deserted town of Namie in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture, the Independent reports.

Now former residents of the ghost-town — once housing 21,000 people — can see the damage wrought by the 2011 tsunami. A subsequent nuclear meltdown at the nearby Daiichi nuclear plant led to an evacuation of the town.

“Many want to know the current state of the disaster area,” Mayor Tomotsu Baba told the Independent's David McNeil. “They wonder what’s become of it and feel a great need to see it for themselves.”

According to ABC News more than half of the residents of the town have permanently relocated, and Baba himself works from a city roughly 40 miles away.

"We still have to wear hazmat suits and get government approval, just to go home," Baba told ABC News. "How can we even begin to rebuild under circumstances such as that."

Baba estimates it will be at least 10 years before residents return home.

Take a look for yourself here:

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Full panoramas of the town will soon be added to Google Map's post-Fukushima project, Postcards of the Future. The project shows scenes from Namie and other hard-hit locations, before and after the tsunami.