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Merged 8.8 quake in Sendai, Japan

My eldest son is out there now; at first he emailed to tell me of every tremor but now he just tells me about the big ones.
 
Interesting article on how the Earth rings like a bell
http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/21/2939174/japan-quake-set-texas-aquifer.html
Within 15 minutes of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake, the Edward Aquifer Authority's J-17 monitoring well in Bexar County started to vibrate, with the water level fluctuating about a foot.
"It moved up and down for almost two hours," said Roland Ruiz, a spokesman for the water authority. "We thought it was certainly interesting that a quake that far away would register in the aquifer."

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According to a report I heard on the news, Dallas actually moved up and down 1cm when the shock wave got this far...
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Puppycow said:
The problem with Rikuzentakata seems to be topographical. The bay is shaped like a funnel so that the force of the tsunami was concentrated on the town itself, reaching 15 meters (50 feet) in height.

I suspect that >99% of those still missing are dead too (although perhaps there may be some overlap if all bodies have not been identified).
Dead and missing up to 21,911.
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I was reading the paper at lunchtime and noticed a very different snippet from Rikuzentakata.

The Herald said:
Coastal Rikuzentakata was a town of 23,000, mostly elderly, people. About 740 were killed and more than 1,700 remain missing.
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That's a lot closer to the official figures (scaled down to town level) and very much below the unofficial estimates coming out of the town last week. It suggests a high percentage of the "missing" have actually showed up. It's still a 10% fatality rate, but when they were talking about half the town at one stage, it's encouraging. And that's the place where the floodgates didn't shut and the tsunami shelters were below the level the tsunami reached.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I really can't make out whether the real death toll is indeed "only" going to come out around 15,000, or whether the sheer scale of the catastrophe means the half has not yet been told us.

Rolfe.
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I do wonder how good the reporting method is. Friends and families reporting people missing is fine in many disasters but when entire villages disappear there is a good chance that many don't have friends and family left ot report them missing.

I still wonder if the current number of missing is vastly under-reported based on the footage I've seen, so can only hope for the best.
 
That was rather my thought, but entire villages don't seem to have disappeared quite like that. A fair number seem to have escaped from all the inundated settlements, no doubt thanks to the warning systems. Their initial reports tended to go "OMG there's 10,000 people missing from this town alone!", but these numbers are coming down as more and more people gather in rescue centres. It may bottom out lower rather than higher.

I also suspect quite a few people swept away in things that floated such as cars and houses might have survived until the wave ran to a halt. You'd be more likely to drown if you were caught in the open, or trapped inside something immoveable that filled with water.

The report from Taro actually showed the rescue team retrieving a woman's clothes from her wrecked house, because there were no bodies to find. And that was the place with the super-duper sea walls that were supposed to hold back anything the sea could throw at them, and yet they gave. It seems the inhabitants headed for the hills anyway, and maybe the sea wall gave them extra time to get there.

Rolfe.
 
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celestrin said:
The "Miyako" clip from the BBC is actually from Kamaishi (39°16'31.87"N 141°53'19.34"E), some 40km to the south of Miyako.

Here's a different angle.
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Oh, thanks. I see now where the video was taken from. Here's the building that the camera focuses on for a lot of the shot.

That second vid is seriously scary - well, they both are. It's good to see how many people seem to have made it to buildings that are holding up, though.

ETA: I've fixed the wiki pages - these two clips are now on the Kamaishi page, and the one of Shinkawacho is on the Miyako page, with suitable notes about the misattribution.

Rolfe.
 
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Rolfe said:
...And that was the place with the super-duper sea walls that were supposed to hold back anything the sea could throw at them, and yet they gave...
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I haven't seen all of the videos. Did some of the sea wall actually collapse or wash away? Or were they simply overtopped?
 
One Skunk Todd said:
I haven't seen all of the videos. Did some of the sea wall actually collapse or wash away? Or were they simply overtopped?
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The film from Taro actually showed the huge, enormous sluice gates that were supposed to hold back a tsunami, crumpled like tissue paper. Of course that let the wave in, but I suspect it may have overtopped the wall anyway. Most of what I have seen has suggested overtopped walls, rather than failure. However, footage from both Taro and Rikuzentakata shows failed sluice gates (the Rikuzentakata gate may never actually have closed). I imagine sluice gates are necessary to let rivers exit to the sea, or just to allow the land to drain, and that may be a weak point.

Rolfe.
 
The barrier at face value would appear to be high enough to withstand the tsunami that hit Japan, but it's only 500 metres in length. I can't see anything similar being constructed except to protect another major capital city.
 
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