LI native 'never felt anything like it'

As her Tokyo building swayed side to side, Rocky Point native Samantha Kjaerbye huddled with colleagues in a stairwell between the 18th and 19th floors.

Then, a second quake rocked the building.

"We all crouched on the floor and prayed," Kjaerbye, 32, now of Bayside, Queens, wrote in an e-mail to Newsday on Friday. "I felt so helpless."

Kjaerbye, a certified public accountant and graduate of Rocky Point High School, is in the Roppongi section of Tokyo on business. She said she was on the 31st floor of the Midtown Tower, the tallest office building in Tokyo, when the quake struck.

When the magnitude 8.9 quake struck Japan on Friday, she first thought it was minor.

Then, she said, "it started to increase in intensity."

Kjaerbye said she was texting her fiance when the quake hit. It was 2:46 p.m. in Japan.

"Then the fire alarm went off in our building and we all ran to the stairwell," she wrote. "My Japanese colleagues were not bothered, as they thought it was a 'typical small quake.' "

Then, the tower began to sway "at least three feet in either direction" on earthquake rollers designed to minimize damage.

"I started to see the fear in their faces," she wrote.

She and her colleagues ran into the stairwell and were between floors when the first aftershock hit. "I crouched down on the floor with a thousand other colleagues and prayed."

A fire on the first floor had to be put out before the building could be evacuated.

"We finally exited the building 30 minutes later," she wrote.

Kjaerbye is staying at the nearby ANA Intercontinental Hotel.

Kjaerbye said she travels to Japan about four times a year on business. She arrived in Tokyo on Wednesday and was scheduled to fly back to New York on Saturday.

Kjaerbye wrote that she was "looking forward to coming home," though she has no idea when she'll be able to fly back to New York.

"The idea of earthquakes was always in the back of my mind," Kjaerbye wrote. "But I never thought I would be here for a big one."