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Merged 8.8 quake in Sendai, Japan

I wonder if all these videos will be educational for the future? As in, look what can happen, kids. Do not ignore a tsunami warning, and do not assume walls will protect you.

There's nothing like seeing that sort of thing for putting the fear of the Deep Blue Sea into anyone.

Rolfe.
 
Puppycow said:
The Japanese National Police Agency publishes the statistics by prefecture here:
English version
Japanese version (if you want to learn the kanji for the prefectures)

It does does not include cause of death however. (The word "door" in the table actually is just the Japanese unit for counting buildings, like "head" is the English unit for counting cattle)
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Thank you, Puppycow. Man, fatalities as far down as Kanagawa. Probably not tsunami related. Even though you did get quite a surge there as well. I've seen videos of a few rivers flowing upstream and Zushi bay filling up with water. And, hey, I'm a land rat, I get intimidated by those 5 gallon water bottles...
Keep safe.
 
celestrin said:
Oh, youtube just removed the other one I was thinking of. There was this woman from Kamaishi. Camera, filming from the top of the hill, shows her as she was just getting in a car, while the waves crashed over and through the tsunami walls. She was swept away in her car. Clearly another unfortunate fatality as the wave rages through town. Yet later, the same woman appears on the roof of an adjacent building!

The removed video was an interview with her. Although my Japanese is getting better by the minute, as I'm starting to recognize some kanji, I didn't understand it. But it appears that her car got pushed up against the building, was kept above water and she somehow managed to escape into it.
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You're probably referring to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ADNbeDldG8
 
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celestrin said:
Yup, that's the woman. I'm not sure it's from the same TV station, though. Thanks for the working link. My previous one disappeared due to legal complaints.

What's the word on the man on the roof, about 4min15s into the video?
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The man on the roof is her son. The house he was on drifted away but he managed to get onto another building and from there on to a hill. They both survived.
 
It's amazing how many people did survive, some from quite precarious predicaments. The total death toll looks like being a lot lower than I originally anticipated, for which I'm truly thankful.

Rolfe.
 
And we just had another fairly large aftershock. Don't know the magnitude yet, but it seems to be near the Fukushima I power station.

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/

ETA:

JMA Seismic Intensity Region Name
6- Fukushima-ken Nakadori
Fukushima-ken Hamadori
Ibaraki-ken Nambu
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The JMA Seismic Intensity is the intensity of shaking at a particular location. 7 is the maximum on the scale, then 6+ followed by 6-, 5+ and 5-, then 4, 3, 2, and 1. Only 5 and 6 on the scale are subdivided into plus and minus.
 
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The BBC is reporting that power was cut to three of the reactors (and that was the Breaking News on the BBC News channel a short time ago), but has now been restored.

The 7.1-magnitude tremor triggered a brief tsunami warning, and forced workers to evacuate the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

The epicentre of the quake was in Fukushima prefecture, and struck at a depth of just 10km (six miles).

It came as Japan said it was extending the evacuation zone around the nuclear plant because of radiation concerns.

The cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were damaged in last month's disaster. Workers have been struggling to prevent several reactors from overheating, and avert a large-scale release of radiation.

The plant's operator, Tepco, said power used to pump water to cool three damaged reactors had been cut briefly but early indications suggested the plant had not sustained any further damage.
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Yup, multiple earthquakes. USGS has one at M6.6, 3x M5's and 6x M4's. There's another M5 further north and a couple 4's further off coast. Don't know how those magnitudes translate into japanese system.

The orange circles are the quakes in the past day.
 
In case anyone's interested, here's the thing I've been compiling over the past month.

It's the list of tsunami related videos and the locations where they were shot from. Almost exclusively YouTube. It's still very much a work in progress. There are still quite a few videos missing, especially from the area between Kesennuma and Miyako. I've lost my original compilation about a week ago when Google Earth misfired on me and had to do it all over again.

Google Maps version from a few days ago:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=e...5482291752569899208.0004a067a81260b8089c5&z=6
This might take a while to load. I haven't used GMaps all that much, so I don't know whether slow load times are due to my computer/browser setup or whether it's GMaps itself that can't handle a couple hundred placemarks with embedded video...

My current Google Earth kmz file is in the attachment. Unzip and drag it into GE.
 

Attachments

One aspect of this that has been overshadowed by the tsunami disaster and the nuclear disaster is the effect of liquefaction on so-called "reclaimed land" (埋立地 in Japanese) of which there is 249 square kilometers in Tokyo Bay according to the link. Compared to regular land, the developed areas built on reclaimed land, particularly newer reclaimed land, did not fare as well in the earthquake. Some new apartment buildings or condominiums have developed a lean like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The following video shows manholes that rose up out of the ground:



ETA:
In this video you can see cracks opening up in the ground and water bubbling up out of the ground.
 
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Puppycow said:
One aspect of this that has been overshadowed by the tsunami disaster and the nuclear disaster is the effect of liquefaction on so-called "reclaimed land" (埋立地 in Japanese) of which there is 249 square kilometers in Tokyo Bay according to the link. Compared to regular land, the developed areas built on reclaimed land, particularly newer reclaimed land, did not fare as well in the earthquake. Some new apartment buildings or condominiums have developed a lean like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The following video shows manholes that rose up out of the ground:



ETA:
In this video you can see cracks opening up in the ground and water bubbling up out of the ground.
Click to expand...


Incredible. Thanks for bringing it to our attention here.

I have installed miles of utility pipe and dozens of manhole structures. I have to wonder if my reaction to those images is more visceral than that of people who haven't. It takes heavy equipment and lots of additional sweat to get those things into the ground. Seeing them squirted back out like that is very disturbing.

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I'm finding that the term "reclaimed land" is beginning to grate on me, since it is almost never actually "reclaimed" in any practical sense, but rather is built from whole cloth (so to speak) out in the damn water.

I've done buildings on the coast here in the southeast U.S. which were engineered to withstand substantial hurricanes. In some instances there is no bedrock at any depth which it is financially feasible to bear on, and the design for the piles or caissons supporting the structure depend on friction for their support (as does one end of the Brooklyn Bridge. :jaw-dropp) I have to wonder how it would be possible to calculate the effect of liquefaction from earthquakes on such a design dependency.
 
quadraginta said:
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I've done buildings on the coast here in the southeast U.S. which were engineered to withstand substantial hurricanes. In some instances there is no bedrock at any depth which it is financially feasible to bear on, and the design for the piles or caissons supporting the structure depend on friction for their support (as does one end of the Brooklyn Bridge. :jaw-dropp) I have to wonder how it would be possible to calculate the effect of liquefaction from earthquakes on such a design dependency.
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My thought is that buildings in areas like that should be boats. That is they should be buoyant in a fluid that has the same density as the soil they sit on.
 
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