As I write this my house is shaking violently in a strong earthquake…..
>>>>added 00:29
Regular TV broadcasting has been interrupted by a bulletin reporting that Aomori suffered an earthquake registering 6 on the Japanese scale..
They are showing 5+ all along the Pacific Coast of Japan.
Though Tochigi is located quite far from the epicenter, the shaking here was long and strong.
Tsunami warnings are up.
>>>>added 00:32
One thing that was a relief to see was that the advance warning system seems to be working. I was sitting in front of the TV writing some things for Japan News Junkie when suddenly the TV started flashing a warning and announcing in a loud voice, “Prepare for a strong earthquake! Prepare for a strong earthquake!”
>>>>added 00:32
Tsunami warnings have been canceled. They are saying a Japanese intensity scale of 4 for Tochigi, but it felt stronger to me.
>>>>added 00:46
Duration was 15 seconds vertical followed by 30 seconds horizontal. . . It felt like it was a lot longer. . .
>>>>added 00:50
Reports of property damage coming in, but nothing about injuries or deaths…
>>>>added 01:12
Reports of injuries starting to come in.
>>>>added 01:21
Things seem to be settling down, so I am off for a bit of shut eye. . . See you all in 40 winks. . .
No need to look uncute as your home and the world as you know it is crashing down all around you with this fashionably pink Hello Kitty disaster kit, which includes:
The New York Times has a report about Huang Qi, a Chinese human rights advocate who, ironically told National Public Radio recently that there have been great improvements in the human rights situation in China.
BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.
The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.
Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.
A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.
“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”
There is no official death toll for the children who died in schools during the Shichuan Province earthquake on May 12. According to estimates by the Chinese government, seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed.
Japan has once again made world news; this time with a large earthquake which rocked northern Japan. The 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck at 8:43 am on Saturday in Iwate Prefecture and killed at least 6 people and injured scores more. On the Japanese scale, the quake measured 6 out of 7. I felt the quake all the way down in Yokohama and figured it was a big one based on its long duration.
I’m not the only one to note the strange synchronicity of Ed’s post on recent Japanese earthquakes, and the very large tremor which rocked China this week. It feels a bit strange to blog about a part of Asia, and to not, at the very least, acknowledge the human tragedy, particularly since China has made the unusual gesture of asking other nations for help.
NPR has a rather harrowing, but gripping account of a family’s search for their two year old son. I can’t seem to embed the player, but you can hop over to the site, and click the “Listen Now” button to hear the narration, which will surely put a human face on this sprawling wreck of a story.
On Monday, Fu Guanyu dropped off her young son, Wang Zhilu, at his grandparents’ house so she could go to work. Minutes later, the earthquake hit.
She rushed back home and saw their apartment building in ruins. She says soldiers came right away to help, but they had no equipment.
Had a hard time sleeping last night as a swarm of earthquakes kept rocking me out of my slumber over about an hour.
When I was first shaken awake by a strong jolt, I turned on the light and noted the time was 1:10 a.m. After settling back in and drifting off a bit, the house started shaking hard enough to wake me up again. This cycle off getting back to sleep and being shaken awake must have occurred about five or six times during the night, with a couple of really hard jolts thrown in for good measure. Also, there was one instance after a strong temblor when I could feel the bed continue to sway back and forth for what seemed to be quite a long time and build back up into another episode of violent shaking.
We had not had a strong earthquake for quite some time and it is easy to forget about them, but old Mother Nature has her ways of keeping you on your toes.
The Washington Post is running an article from Reuters about the consequences of a big earthquake in Tokyo. It contends that the foot traffic from 12,000,000 people would create incredible crowd densities of more than 6 people per square meter! The article also states that:
The Tokyo metropolitan government said in 2006 that a magnitude 7.3 earthquake under Tokyo would probably kill more than 5,600 people and injure almost 160,000. Official estimates of economic damage have topped more than $1 trillion.
It’s easy to forget in normal day-to-day living just how vulnerable Japan is to huge catastrophes.
The next time someone tells you that, in case of an earthquake, turn off the gas, get under a table, stand in a doorway, and do all of that other good stuff, remember this video which was taken by a camera that was rolling when the Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake hit in 1995.
Straight from the Security and Safety Trade Expo in Tokyo is this emergency outfit for dogs. Designed to be either for a dog or cat, the coat includes pockets that contain emergency goods and food.
Why food? You would think that there would be plenty of fresh meat lying around for the enterprising dog or cat to eat following an earthquake or other disaster. . .
A broadband and communications provider serving parts of the Tokyo area, will offer an earthquake advance warning sytem to subscribers beginning October 1, 2007. The “Urgent Earthquake News Flash”, issued from Japan’s Meteorological Agency, will be transmitted to specially installed terminals that use fixed-line phone lines.
The system forecasts the quake arrival time and the seismic intensity of the tremor, 10 seconds in advance, 24/7.
A voice will automatically announce, in Japanese, “The earthquake of four in the seismic intensity will come in ten seconds. 10-9-8 etc.”
The cordless units can be set up in each room of a residence.
Main unit: 23,000 yen. Cordless unit: 13,000 yen. No monthly fee.
The Japanese government is claiming the problems that occurred at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station in Niigata Prefecture following a powerful earthquake there were less serious than has been reported, and blames “foreign media organizations” (those that don’t come under the thumb of the kisha clubs) for blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
The Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry blamed foreign media organizations Friday for what the ministries say were inappropriate or inaccurate reports on a nuclear power station in Niigata Prefecture damaged by a powerful earthquake that as a result caused misunderstanding and a drop in tourism.
Niigata Prefecture is meanwhile trying to dispel concern among vacationers by conducting radiation checks at beaches and on marine products that it says have so far tested negative for radiation following troubles, including radioactive water and other radiation leaks, at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s shoreline Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station.
Kind of sounds like a scene out of Jaws, doesn’t it?
Workers used paper towels to wipe up radioactive water that spilled from a spent nuclear fuel storage pool at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant during the 6.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Niigata Prefecture.
• Japan, situated on the “Ring of Fire” arc of volcanoes and ocean trenches that partly encircles the Pacific Basin, accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.
• A tremor occurs in Japan at least every five minutes, and each year there are up to 2,000 quakes that can be felt by people.
• The Great Kanto earthquake of September 1, 1923, which had a magnitude of 7.9, killed more than 140,000 people in the Tokyo area. Seismologists have said another such quake could strike the city at any time.
• On January 16, 1995, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 hit central Japan, devastating the western port city of Kobe. It was the worst earthquake to hit Japan in 50 years, killing more than 6,400 and causing an estimated $100 billion in damage.
• On October 23, 2004, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck the Niigata region, about 250 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, killing 65 people and injuring 3,000.
• On March 25, 2007, a 6.9 magnitude quake struck the Noto peninsula in Ishikawa prefecture, about 300 km west of Tokyo, killing one person, injuring more than 200 and destroying hundreds of homes.
* The Tokyo metropolitan government said in March 2006 that a magnitude 7.3 earthquake under Tokyo would probably kill more than 5,600 people and injure almost 160,000. Official estimates of economic damage have topped more than $1 trillion.
• German insurer Munich Re was even more pessimistic, saying in 2004 that a severe earthquake in the Tokyo-Yokohama area would kill hundreds of thousands of people, cause damage running into trillions of dollars and have global economic repercussions.
• The Tokyo-Yokohama metropolis, with a population of 35 million, has the highest “at risk” rating from natural disasters such as earthquakes of any of the world’s 30 “megacities”, the report said.
Yesterday I posted a short piece about a radioactive water leak at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world’s largest, in northeastern Japan following a major earthquake there on Monday.
Now we get word that in addition to the leaking water there were other problems caused by the quake, including nuclear waste drums that spilled, fires, and burst pipes.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said a total of 50 cases of malfunctioning and trouble had been found at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant since Monday’s magnitude 6.6 quake, which killed at least nine people and left 13,000 homeless.
The company said they were still inspecting the plant, which shut down automatically after the quake, and further problems could emerge.
“Personally I think a nuclear power plant is the safest place you could go in an earthquake,” said Hisashi Ninokata, a nuclear engineering professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. “That’s how much care they take over construction.”
Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors (the U.S. has 104) produce about one third of its electrical power.
SunShine Co. Ltd., a security firm in Tokyo, is planning to market a home earthquake warning device from this coming October.
The size of a paperback book, the EQGuard accesses data from the early warning system network maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JAMA) via the Internet and sounds a loud countdown up to 20 seconds before an earthquake starts.
According to SunShine, the countdown should give people warning enough to allow them to duck under a table, turn off fires, etc.
The appliance sends alerts once it detects primary waves, or the first waves of an earthquake that do not cause major rattling but travel faster than the secondary waves that are responsible for the actual shaking.
The alerts could precede the shaking by 10 to 20 seconds, although the period would be much shorter — and in some cases absent — if the tremor’s center is near.
I don’t know. . . To me it sounds like that old George Carlin routine in which he imagines a two-minute warning before we die. Two minutes before you check out, a voice goes off in your head, “You’ve got two minutes. . . Get your sh*t together. . .”
Japan’s vulnerability to natural disasters is increasing as skyscrapers mushroom in cities, shopping malls go underground and the population ages, a recent government report says.
“In addition to growing risk of natural hazards, our society has become more vulnerable to disasters,” the disaster prevention white paper said. According to an Associated Press report in China Post:
Densely populated cities are crowded with high-rise buildings and apartments that are at higher risk in earthquakes and storms. Proliferating underground shopping malls are also vulnerable to quakes and flooding. The growing percentage of elderly in the population also presents rescuers with more people likely to be hurt in a disaster, coupled with fewer able-bodied who can help them.
The report called for awareness-raising campaigns, more active participation in disaster prevention activities by companies, and research and development of earthquake and tsunami alert technologies.
While Japan’s vulnerability is growing, so is extreme weather. Over the past decade, the number of torrential rains have nearly doubled and major earthquakes occurred in areas not considered usual danger zones, such as Niigata and Noto in northern Japan.
The report said the number of skyscrapers exceeding the height of 100 meters (330 feet) has more than quadrupled over the last 15 years while the number of single elderly households nearly doubled in the last decade.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 rocked central Japan injuring at least 11 people and damaging a 400-year-old castle’s stone wall in Kameyama which is in Mie Prefecture.
17 houses in the area and other structures including the castle wall suffered minor damage in the city. Chubu Electric Power Company which is in the area said some 4,300 households suffered a temporary blackout due to the quake, mainly in northern Mie Prefecture and electronic giant Sharp suspended operations at its liquid crystal display panel plant in Kameyama and evacuated its roughly 300 workers. No damage was reported at the plant either.
Japan’s vulnerability to natural disasters is increasing as skyscrapers mushroom in cities, shopping malls go underground and the population ages, a recent government report says.
