Tokyo in "panic mode" over nuke reactors

An American who lives in Tokyo with his wife and two young sons says all eyes are on the nuclear reactors in danger of melting down in the wake of the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan Friday and tsunami that followed. He says the quake seemed to last "forever" and aftershocks were "violent."

Tom Byer told "The Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Russ Mitchell, "Everything is calm here inside Tokyo, I mean, as in there's no real damage or anything. Everybody's just trying to get back to normal here. But the problem is that everybody's very anxious, because we're not really getting any good information from the media or the government."

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Byer said later, "The only problem right now is that everybody is in major panic about these nuclear reactors."

He was home when the temblor hit Friday. He'd just picked up his sons from school. "We've lived with these earthquakes - I've been here 25 years," Byer said. "I was fortunate to be home with the family. And then, it just started to hit and it just went on forever. And as much as you try to prepare for this, you really do go into the panic mode just trying to think of what to do. In my case, I've got two small boys, 5 and 2 years old, so the priority was to make sure that these little guys were safe. "

The thought the shaker could kill people crossed his mind, Byer says. "I really did think it. I thought there was a possibility of possibly, you know, the house collapsing, or just some major destruction, because it just was not letting down. It was just getting worse and worse and worse and it was just so long. And I've just, you know, in 25 years I've never been through an earthquake quite like this one."

It took "a long time," he added, for him to realize he and his loved ones would be OK "because after the - that original first earthquake, a little bit before 3:00, the aftershocks just consistently came for hours afterwards. Just hours. So we were just constantly ready to go into the, you know, kind of hiding places, so to speak, under tables and things, because it was just so bad."

Those aftershocks, he says, were "very intense. Very intense. Just - I mean, almost the starting of what you would think is, again, that similar earthquake that we had earlier, a little bit before 3:00, the main one. I mean, they were intense. I mean, usually, the aftershocks come and they're quite small. But these were quite violent aftershocks. I just couldn't believe it. There was really no stop and start. There was a point where I think those aftershocks went all the way virtually almost until the morning the next day."

Now, though, things are calm. "We haven't had any aftershocks at all (Saturday)," Byer noted. "The only problem right now is that everybody is in major panic about these nuclear reactors," even though Tokyo is 170 miles away.

"For us," he pointed out, "that's close enough, because one other thing, you know, when this happened yesterday, you were kind of broken into either one or two groups: people who were outside, at work, away from the home, or you were in your home. I happened to be in my home. So I was kind of like lockdown.

"I was telling someone today, it was kind of similar to what happened on 9/11 where, you know, you're at home, you're at lockdown. You're just glued to the television set. You're just dying, looking for information, you know, of what's going to happen. But today, I went and I drove around, you know, a little bit through Tokyo. So visually, there's nothing. There's no damage. You can't see anything. But, you can see long lines at the gas stations, and when you go into most of the food stores or the 7-Elevens, a quarter or half of the shelves are cleared out."