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Town is washed off map

It’s the Japanese town that drowned.

More than half of the 18,000 residents of Minamisanriku were missing yesterday after the Pacific coast fishing port was essentially wiped off the map by Friday’s deadly earthquake and tsunami.

The 9,500 missing Minamisanriku residents could add dramatically to the toll of 1,700 estimated dead in Japan’s worst disaster in decades.

Eerie photos of the lifeless town showed only a few concrete buildings still standing in the ravaged region that is under water.

The tsunami wave was about 33 feet high, witnesses said. An ocean buoy was reported found atop a three-story building, and Japanese TV reported that the water had reached the fourth story of a five-floor building.

About 7,500 residents were evacuated to the town’s rooftops as well as 25 shelters, as the Japan Self-Defense Forces attempted to locate missing residents, media reports said.

Minamisanriku, in the hard-hit Miyagi Prefecture, has only one public hospital. Seven patients were reported to have died there on Friday night. Hospital workers were waiting for food and water over the weekend.

Minamisanriku was created in 2005 by the merger of two smaller towns, Shizugawa and Utatsu. Its economy depends on fishing and tourism, and the town has a museum displaying dinosaur fossils and ancient fishing gear.

It’s not the first time the district has been ravaged by natural disaster. In 1960, a killer wave that began off the coast of Chile destroyed the area and killed 41 people.

akarni@nypost.com