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Godfather
03-11-2011, 07:29 AM
Thoughts and prayers for the people in Japan. This is huge :(

In various locations along Japan's coast, TV footage showed severe flooding, with dozens of cars, boats and even buildings being carried along by waters. A large ship swept away by the tsunami rammed directly into a breakwater in Kesennuma city in Miyagi prefecture, according to footage on public broadcaster NHK.

Officials were trying to assess possible damage from the quake but had no immediate details.

The quake that struck 2:46 p.m. local time was followed by a series of aftershocks, including a 7.4-magnitude one about 30 minutes later. The US Geological Survey upgraded the strength of the first quake to a magnitude 8.9.

The meteorological agency issued a tsunami warning for the entire Pacific coast of Japan. National broadcaster NHK was warning those near the coast to get to safer ground.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said a tsunami warning was in effect for Japan, Russia, Marcus Island and the Northern Marianas. A tsunami watch has been issued for Guam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.S. state of Hawaii.

The quake struck at a depth of six miles, about 80 miles off the eastern coast, the agency said. The area is 240 miles northeast of Tokyo.

In downtown Tokyo, large buildings shook violently and workers poured into the street for safety. TV footage showed a large building on fire and bellowing smoke in the Odaiba district of Tokyo.

In central Tokyo, trains were stopped and passengers walked along the tracks to platforms.

Footage on NHK from their Sendai office showed employees stumbling around and books and papers crashing from desks.

Several quakes had hit the same region in recent days, including a 7.3 magnitude one on Wednesday.

Thirty minutes after the quake, tall buildings were still swaying in Tokyo and mobile phone networks were not working. Japan's Coast Guard has set up task force and officials are standing by for emergency contingencies, Coast Guard official Yosuke Oi said.

"I'm afraid we'll soon find out about damages, since the quake was so strong," he said

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 07:37 AM
Scary stuff...I hope there won't be many casualties :( (OMG seeing reports on CNN :shock:)

Godfather
03-11-2011, 07:42 AM
Yeah the reports on CNN :( :shock:

All the reporting is quite sketchy still


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKh-QaeT6rc


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfKInCBWxI

Foxdana
03-11-2011, 07:42 AM
Mother Nature is in a bitch of a mood at the moment!

I hope there is minimal loss of life from this!

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 07:45 AM
I'm hoping the same...but seeing what I'm seeing...very unlikely :(

Godfather
03-11-2011, 07:52 AM
Agreed, there are going to be well over a thousand dead if not far far more from what I'm reading already :(


This is the 7th largest earthquake ever recorded.... it's being called the Sendai earthquake and tsunami already.

Tsunami warnings in half a dozen other countries now as well, including Hawaii. Hopefully those areas get off easy comparatively.

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 07:57 AM
its 8.9...Haiti was 7.0.

Godfather
03-11-2011, 07:58 AM
I've seen one video of the tsunami coming over a farming area... the Tsunami has burning debris in it. It's terrifying... and as it's getting closer to roads you can see cars trying to race away. It's unbelievable.

The footage here is going to be incredible...

Godfather
03-11-2011, 07:59 AM
its 8.9...Haiti was 7.0.

Yep... the 2004 boxing day tsunami was a 9.2. Fairly similar :wha:

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 07:59 AM
It is...its 4 A.M here...can't sleep looking at this (seeing a Tsunami right now...OMG :shock:)

AntZ
03-11-2011, 08:01 AM
I'm watching the new film on NHK Japan, those mud waves swallowing those farms and buildings are surreal!!

Godfather
03-11-2011, 08:05 AM
Thank God Japan is so much more industrialized than the Haiti quake that killed so many... this earthquake had almost 100 times more shake amplitude (remembering that this was almost a 9, and Haiti was a 7... each point being 10 times more shake than the last).

Energy wise, it's 1000 times more energy than a 7 (31.7 times energy release)

AntZ
03-11-2011, 08:06 AM
With the quake that hit NZ a couple weeks ago, the violent volcanic activity in Hawaii this week, and now this! I wonder if this is the start of the long predicted "Ring of Fire" shake up? Is California or other west coast areas next?

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 08:07 AM
The earthquake itself won't do that much damage...its the Tsunamis it provokes that is bad.

AntZ
03-11-2011, 08:16 AM
The earthquake itself won't do that much damage...its the Tsunamis it provokes that is bad.

Tsunamis do devastating damage, but quakes frequently do unseen damage that's not known for days, weeks, or months. After the Northridge quake in L.A., they were condemning buildings, and whole neighborhoods due to structural damage months later!

Foxdana
03-11-2011, 08:18 AM
Tsunamis do devastating damage, but quakes frequently do unseen damage that's not known for days, weeks, or months. After the Northridge quake in L.A., they were condemning buildings, and whole neighborhoods due to structural damage months later!

Look at New Zealand too, smaller earthquake than the one last year, but much more damage!

samarchepas
03-11-2011, 08:22 AM
I meant about Japan here...their buildings are more "earthquake proof", so there tsunamis are a much greater threat than the earthquakes themselves (the 8.9 and the multiple aftershocks)

Max
03-11-2011, 08:30 AM
as a native Californian who's been through many nasty quakes, my heart goes out to these people. I hope the loss of life is minimal, but considering what we know so far, my fear is that the casualties will escalate rapidly.

AntZ
03-11-2011, 11:02 AM
Quake hits Hawaii amid tsunami warning

Friday, March 11, 2011





HONOLULU (KABC) -- A magnitude-4.5 earthquake has struck Hawaii as residents brace for a tsunami after a massive earthquake in Japan.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages from the quake, which hit 30 miles southeast of Hilo. A geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey says the earthquakes are likely not related.

People in Honolulu coastal areas have started to evacuate after authorities sounded tsunami warning sirens.

Hundreds of residents in Oahu flocked to the supermarket to buy water and supplies.

The estimated earliest arrival of the first tsunami wave for Hawaii is 4:59 a.m. PT (2:59 a.m. HST). People in low-lying areas were being evacuated. Officials said anyone on three stories or higher shouldn't be worried.

The magnitude-8.9 earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. about 80 miles off the eastern coast of Japan.

The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center widened its tsunami warning beyond East Asia late Thursday to include Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Central and South America and the rest of the Pacific Ocean. A tsunami warning later was expanded to include the entire western U.S. coast.

AntZ
03-11-2011, 11:05 AM
This is from their new airport, good thing there were no planes there!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DSSssHxm4Y

AntZ
03-11-2011, 11:12 AM
At this moment, they are saying that they are unable to cool one of their nuclear reactors! :shock:

St. George
03-11-2011, 11:29 AM
*shakes head.

Fingers crossed that people were well prepared/warned and have largely been able to escape the quake and the tsunami?

Looks horrific and makes you realise just how lucky you are living somewhere where things like this, on such a scale, don't happen often, if at all, ever.

Teh One Who Knocks
03-11-2011, 02:34 PM
Wow, this is just incredible...the sheer power of Mother Nature.

Hal-9000
03-11-2011, 07:23 PM
My brother and his wife are in Hawaii right now...he actually texted me late last night (not his habit)
They're ok....

my heart goes out to the people in southeast Asia, devastating

Max
03-11-2011, 10:02 PM
Reading updates, I'm fearing the radiation matter may be more grave than originally thought. I think the Japanese were quick to get people from harms way, but some indications are that radiation indeed leaked beyond at least one facility. Just read the US air force has already delivered coolant there to keep the fuel rods from getting any hotter. This could possibly create some serious ecological issues.

Glad to see so many countries coming to help. Why the hell can't the international community be civil like this all the time? It's a shame that death and destruction are needed to bring out helping hands.

AntZ
03-11-2011, 11:34 PM
URGENT: Radiation 1,000 times higher than normal detected at nuke plant

TOKYO, March 12, Kyodo



The amount of radiation reached around 1,000 times the normal level Saturday in the control room of the No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

The discovery suggests radioactive steam could spread around the facility operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

==Kyodo


http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/76948.html

Max
03-12-2011, 03:09 AM
TOKYO – Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.

Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant's Unit 1 scrambled ferociously to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9 magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system.

Some 3,000 people within two miles (three kilometers) of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.

The government declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit — the first at a nuclear plant in Japan's history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.

The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too. Nearly 14,000 people living near the two power plants were ordered to evacuate.

Japan's nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi's Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding.

Officials at the Daiichi facility began venting radioactive vapors from the unit to relieve pressure inside the reactor case. The loss of electricity had delayed that effort for several hours.

Plant workers there labored to cool down the reactor core, but there was no prospect for immediate success. They were temporarily cooling the reactor with a secondary system, but it wasn't working as well as the primary one, according to Yuji Kakizaki, an official at the Japanese nuclear safety agency.

Even once a reactor is shut down, radioactive byproducts give off heat that can ultimately produce volatile hydrogen gas, melt radioactive fuel, or even breach the containment building in a full meltdown belching radioactivity into the surroundings, according to technical and government authorities.

Despite plans for the intentional release of radioactivity, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation.

"With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure the safety," Edano said at a televised news conference early Saturday.

It was unclear if the elevation of radioactivity around the reactor was known at the time he spoke.

The outside measurement of radiation at Daiichi was far below the allowed limit for a year, other officials said, reporting that it would take 70 days standing at the gate to reach the yearly limit.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician who runs a disaster preparedness institute at Columbia University, said the reported level of radiation outside the plant would not pose an immediate danger, though it could lift the rate of thyroid cancer in a population over time.

However, he called the reported level inside the plant extraordinarily high, raising a concern about acute health effects. "I would personally absolutely not want to be inside," he said.

While the condition of the reactor cores was of utmost concern, Tokyo Electric Power Co. also warned of power shortages and an "extremely challenging situation in power supply for a while."

The Daiichi site is located in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. The 460-megawatt Unit 1 began operating in 1971 and is the oldest at the site. It is a boiling water reactor that drives the turbine with radioactive water, unlike pressurized water reactors usually found in the United States. Japanese regulators decided in February to allow it to run another 10 years.

The temperature inside the reactor wasn't reported, but Japanese regulators said it wasn't dropping as quickly as they wanted.

Kakizaki, the safety agency official, said the emergency cooling system is intact and could kick in as a last line of defense. "That's as a last resort, and we have not reached that stage yet," he added.

Defense Ministry official Ippo Maeyama said dozens of troops trained for chemical disasters had been dispatched to the plant in case of a radiation leak, along with four vehicles designed for use in atomic, biological and chemical warfare.

Technical experts said the plant would presumably have hours, but probably not days, to try to stabilize things.

Leonard S. Spector, director of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said loss of coolant is the most serious type of accident at a nuclear power plant.

"They are busy trying to get coolant to the core area," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The big thing is trying to get power to the cooling systems."

High-pressure pumps can temporarily cool a reactor in this state with battery power, even when electricity is down, according to Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who used to work in the U.S. nuclear industry. They can open and close relief valves needed to control pressure. Batteries would go dead within hours but could be replaced.

The IAEA said "mobile electricity supplies" had arrived at the Daiichi plant. It wasn't clear if they were generators or batteries.

It also was not immediately clear how closely the reactor had moved toward dangerous pressure or temperature levels. If temperatures were to keep rising to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it could set off a chemical reaction that begins to embrittle the metallic zirconium that sheathes the radioactive uranium fuel.

That reaction releases hydrogen, which can explode when cooling water finally floods back into the reactor. That was also concern for a time during the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

If the reactor temperature keeps reaches around 4,000 degrees, the fuel could melt outright, and the reactor could slump right into the bottom of the containment building in a partial meltdown. Then the crucial question would be whether the building would stay intact.

"The last line of defense is that containment — and that's got to hold," Gundersen said. If it doesn't, the radioactive load inside the reactor can pour out into the surroundings.

The plant is just south of the Miyagi prefecture, which was the region hardest hit by the quake. A fire broke out at another nuclear plant in that area in a turbine building at one of the Onagawa power reactors. Smoke poured from the building, but the fire was put out. Turbine buildings of such boiling water reactors, though separate from the reactor, do contain radioactive water, but at much lower levels than inside the reactor. A water leak was reported in another Onagawa reactor.

No radioactive releases were reported in any of the other affected plants.

As Japan is one of the most seismically active nations in the world, it has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for constructing plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.

As one of the most seismically active countries in the world, Japan has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for building plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.

Even so, 10 of Japan's 54 commercial reactors were shut down because of the quake, and Tokyo Electric Power said it had to reduce power generation. Japan gets about 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.

samarchepas
03-12-2011, 03:43 AM
As if things were not bad already...:(

Deepsepia
03-12-2011, 04:10 AM
The Japanese have escaped with remarkably little damage, considering how intense this quake was. That's credit to some very good engineering and a lot of preparedness. There's amazing video of Tokyo skyscrapers, swaying back and forth . . . in most other places, they'd have collapsed.

Godfather
03-12-2011, 04:38 AM
I'm glued to CNN... the footage is unbelievable. It's kind of amazing to see all this raw footage showing up on TV and the internet we didn't get in Haiti because of the number of cell-phone cams and such that industrialized nations have, especially Japan




My brother and his wife are in Hawaii right now...he actually texted me late last night (not his habit)
They're ok....

my heart goes out to the people in southeast Asia, devastating

Glad to hear it.

My mom's friends are there right now too... they got knocks on the door in the middle of the night and had to sleep the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot that was higher ground. Pretty fascinating.



Sounds like a brilliant guy in Cali got himself killed trying to take pictures :roll:

samarchepas
03-12-2011, 04:53 AM
I won't even dare to think what would happen if an earthquake this strong would strike a poor country...Japan is the 3rd richest country in the world...so they were better prepared for it.(Except for Tsunamis...its horrible how it is in Sendai!)

Deepsepia
03-12-2011, 05:02 AM
I won't even dare to think what would happen if an earthquake this strong would strike a poor country...Japan is the 3rd richest country in the world...so they were better prepared for it.(Except for Tsunamis...its horrible how it is in Sendai!)

They;re massively prepared for tsunamis. They've got an tsunami warning network, that activates sirens, seawalls, and most importantly, tsunami gates which close to basically give another meter or so of protection. This activated in the Tohoku, and bought people time to get away (only trouble was that the epicenter was quite close to shore)

Here's a video showing them -- so far as I know, they're not widely used anyplace but Japan


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UirqbnjKhLU&feature=fvwkrel

samarchepas
03-12-2011, 05:46 AM
They basically had 10 minutes to get to safety (which is a very short amount of time considering that it got 10KM inland)

minz
03-12-2011, 08:41 AM
Its heart breaking watching this on the TV :(

AntZ
03-12-2011, 10:08 AM
With the quake that hit NZ a couple weeks ago, the violent volcanic activity in Hawaii this week, and now this! I wonder if this is the start of the long predicted "Ring of Fire" shake up? Is California or other west coast areas next?


:-k



Indonesia volcano erupts, spews lava and gas

AP


– Fri Mar 11, 6:53 am ET



JAKARTA, Indonesia – One of Indonesia's most active volcanos has erupted, sending lava and searing gas clouds tumbling down its slopes.

Volcanology official Agus Budianto said Friday that authorities were still trying to evacuate residents living along the slopes of Mount Karangetang.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or serious damage.

The 5,853-foot (1,784-meter) mountain is located on Siau, part of the Sulawesi island chain. It last erupted in August, killing four people.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is located on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

The eruption happened hours after a massive earthquake in Japan that triggered a Pacific-wide tsunami.

AntZ
03-12-2011, 10:11 AM
:huh:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHfR_wybvw0

Hugh_Janus
03-12-2011, 10:21 AM
they said on the news this morning that they are venting radioactive steam to prevent the place from properly blowing up :wha:

Deepsepia
03-12-2011, 10:36 AM
they said on the news this morning that they are venting radioactive steam to prevent the place from properly blowing up :wha:

Its unclear what the sequence is . . . I've seen this report in the same reports of the explosion . . . hard to tell whether the venting was occurring from this particular reactor, whether they tried to vent and failed (?) This looks like a fairly energetic explosion, perhaps hydrogen.

Not good news.

Hugh_Janus
03-12-2011, 10:48 AM
just watched the news and they said it could be due to the hydrogen buildup and a roof has collapsed, but they're "not sure" which roof it is. can't see it being anything other than the reactor roof and the fact they've apparently evacuated people from a larger radius from the plant seems to confirm it :wha:

Hugh_Janus
03-12-2011, 10:57 AM
man.... I just watched some more footage of the tsunami.... its mental :shock:

and the plant exclusion zone is now 10km :-k starting to prepare for the worst methinks. Scary stuff.

Deepsepia
03-12-2011, 11:16 AM
man.... I just watched some more footage of the tsunami.... its mental :shock:

and the plant exclusion zone is now 10km :-k starting to prepare for the worst methinks. Scary stuff.

Oh, I just saw a 20 km zone reported.

If the inner containment building is still intact (it looks like the outer shell blew) then you wouldn't have a complete disaster. I'm worried, though, that if you've had a breach in one reactor, and you're trying to manage difficult conditions at other reactors on the same site, things could get very difficult.

AntZ
03-12-2011, 01:36 PM
Radiation leaking from Japan's quake-hit nuclear



8:20am EST

By Chris Meyers and Kim Kyung-hoon




FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Radiation leaked from a damaged Japanese nuclear reactor on Saturday after an explosion blew the roof off in the wake of a massive earthquake, but the government insisted that radiation levels were low.

The blast raised fears of a meltdown at the facility north of Tokyo as officials scrambled to contain what could be the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 that shocked the world.

The plant was damaged by Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake, which sent a 10-meter (33-foot) tsunami ripping through towns and cities across the northeast coast. Japanese media estimate that at least 1,300 people were killed.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said there had been no major change in the level of radiation after the explosion because it did not occur inside the reactor container.

"The nuclear reaction facility is surrounded by a steel storage machine, which is then surrounded by a concrete building. This concrete building collapsed. We learnt that the storage machine inside did not explode," he told a news conference.

Edano initially said an evacuation radius of 10 km (6 miles) from the stricken 40-year-old Daiichi 1 reactor plant in Fukushima prefecture was adequate, but then an hour later the boundary was extended to 20 km (13 miles). TV footage showed vapor rising from the plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.

Along the northeast coast, rescue workers searched through the rubble of destroyed buildings, cars and boats, looking for survivors in hardest-hit areas such as the city of Sendai, 300 km (180 miles) northeast of Tokyo.

Dazed residents hoarded water and huddled in makeshift shelters in near-freezing temperatures. Aerial footage showed buildings and trains strewn over mudflats like children's toys.

"All the shops are closed, this is one of the few still open. I came to buy and stock up on diapers, drinking water and food," Kunio Iwatsuki, 68, told Reuters in Mito city, where residents queued outside a damaged supermarket for supplies.

Across the coastline, survivors clambered over nearly impassable roads. In Iwanuma, not far from Sendai, people spelled S.O.S. out on the roof of a hospital surrounded by water, one of many desperate scenes.

The earthquake and tsunami, and now the radiation leak, present Japan's government with its biggest challenge in a generation.

The explosion at Chernobyl's nuclear plant's fourth reactor in 1986 sent thousands of tonnes of toxic nuclear dust billowing across the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. It was the worst civil nuclear disaster.

The blast at the Japanese nuclear facility came as plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was working desperately to reduce pressures in the core of the reactor.

The company has had a rocky past in an industry plagued by scandal. In 2002, the president of the country's largest power utility was forced to resign along with four other senior executives, taking responsibility for suspected falsification of nuclear plant safety records.

Earlier the operator released what it said was a tiny amount of radioactive steam to reduce the pressure and the danger was minimal because tens of thousands of people had already been evacuated from the vicinity.

Reuters journalists were in Fukushima prefecture, about 70 km (40 miles) from the plant. Other media have reported police roadblocks in the area to prevent people getting closer.

INTERNATIONAL RELIEF EFFORT

Friday's tremor was so huge that thousands fled their homes from coastlines around the Pacific Rim, as far away as North and South America, fearful of a tsunami.

Most appeared to have been spared anything more serious than some high waves, unlike Japan's northeast coastline which was hammered by the huge tsunami that turned houses and ships into floating debris as it surged into cities and villages, sweeping aside everything in its path.

"I thought I was going to die," said Wataru Fujimura, a 38-year-old sales representative in Koriyama, Fukushima, north of Tokyo and close to the area worst hit by the quake.

"Our furniture and shelves had all fallen over and there were cracks in the apartment building, so we spent the whole night in the car ... Now we're back home trying to clean."

In one of the worst-hit residential areas, people buried under rubble could be heard calling out for rescue, Kyodo news agency reported earlier.

The international community started to send disaster relief teams on Saturday to help Japan, with the United Nations sending a group to help coordinate work.

The disaster struck as the world's third-largest economy had been showing signs of reviving from an economic contraction in the final quarter of last year. It raised the prospect of major disruptions for many key businesses and a massive repair bill running into tens of billions of dollars.

Toyota Motor Corp, the world's largest carmaker, said it would suspend operations at all of its 12 factories in Japan on Monday to confirm the safety of its employees.

Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said the earth's axis shifted 25 cm as a result of the earthquake, and the U.S. Geological Survey said the main island of Japan had shifted 2.4 meters.

The earthquake was the fifth most powerful to hit the world in the past century. It surpassed the Great Kant quake of September 1, 1923, which had a magnitude of 7.9 and killed more than 140,000 people in the Tokyo area.

The 1995 Kobe quake caused $100 billion in damage and was the most expensive natural disaster in history.

(Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Dean Yates)


http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/us-japan-quake-idUSTRE72A0SS20110312

Max
03-12-2011, 02:56 PM
a bit more on the explosion:


IWAKI, Japan – An explosion at a nuclear power station Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, but a radiation leak was decreasing despite fears of a meltdown from damage caused by a powerful earthquake and tsunami, officials said.

Government spokesman Yukio Edano said the explosion destroyed the exterior walls of the building where the reactor is placed, but not the actual metal housing enveloping the reactor.

That was welcome news for a country suffering from Friday's double disaster that pulverized the northeastern coast, leaving at least 574 people dead by official count.

The scale of destruction was not yet known, but there were grim signs that the death toll could soar. One report said four whole trains had disappeared Friday and still not been located. Local media reports said at least 1,300 people may have been killed.

Edano said the radiation around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant had not risen after the blast, but had in fact decreased. He did not say why that was so.

Officials have not given specific radiation readings for the area, though they said they were elevated before the blast: At one point, the plant was releasing each hour the amount of radiation a person normally absorbs from the environment each year.

Virtually any increase in ambient radiation can raise long-term cancer rates, and authorities were planning to distribute iodine to residents in the area, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iodine counteracts the effects of radiation.

The pressure in the reactor was also decreasing after the blast, according to Edano.

The explosion was preceded by puff of white smoke that gathered intensity until it became a huge cloud enveloping the entire facility, located in Fukushima, 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Iwaki. After the explosion, the walls of the building crumbled, leaving only a skeletal metal frame.

Tokyo Power Electric Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, said four workers suffered fractures and bruises and were being treated at a hospital.

"We have confirmed that the walls of this building were what exploded, and it was not the reactor's container that exploded," said Edano.

The trouble began at the plant's Unit 1 after the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it spawned knocked out power there, depriving it of its cooling system.

The concerns about a radiation leak at the nuclear power plant overshadowed the massive tragedy laid out along a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) stretch of the coastline where scores of villages, towns and cities were battered by the tsunami, packing 23-feet (7-meter) high waves.

It swept inland about six miles (10 kilometers) in some areas, swallowing boats, homes, cars, trees and everything else.

"The tsunami was unbelievably fast," said Koichi Takairin, a 34-year-old truck driver who was inside his sturdy four-ton rig when the wave hit the port town of Sendai.

"Smaller cars were being swept around me," he said. "All I could do was sit in my truck."

His rig ruined, he joined the steady flow of survivors who walked along the road away from the sea and back into the city on Saturday.

Smashed cars and small airplanes were jumbled up against buildings near the local airport, several miles (kilometers) from the shore. Felled trees and wooden debris lay everywhere as rescue workers coasted on boats through murky waters around flooded structures, nosing their way through a sea of debris.

According to official figures, 586 people are missing and 1,105 injured. In addition, police said between 200 and 300 bodies were found along the coast in Sendai, the biggest city in the area near the quake's epicenter.

The true scale of the destruction was still not known more than 24 hours after the quake since washed-out roads and shut airports have hindered access to the area. An untold number of bodies were believed to be buried in the rubble and debris.

Meanwhile, the first wave of military rescuers began arriving by boats and helicopters.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said 50,000 troops joined rescue and recovery efforts, aided by boats and helicopters. Dozens of countries also offered help. President Barack Obama pledged U.S. assistance following what he called a potentially "catastrophic" disaster. He said one U.S. aircraft carrier was already in Japan and a second was on its way. Washington has also dispatched urban search and rescue teams, according to U.S. Ambassador John Roos.

More than 215,000 people were living in 1,350 temporary shelters in five prefectures, or states, the national police agency said. Since the quake, more than 1 million households have not had water, mostly concentrated in northeast. Some 4 million buildings were without power.

About 24 percent of electricity in Japan is produced by 55 nuclear power units in 17 plants and some were in trouble after the quake.

Japan declared states of emergency at two power plants after their units lost cooling ability.

Although the government spokesman played down fears of radiation leak, the Japanese nuclear agency spokesman Shinji Kinjo acknowledged there were still fears of a meltdown.

A "meltdown" is not a technical term. Rather, it is an informal way of referring to a very serious collapse of a power plant's systems and its ability to manage temperatures.

Yaroslov Shtrombakh, a Russian nuclear expert, said a Chernobyl-style meltdown was unlikely.

"It's not a fast reaction like at Chernobyl," he said. "I think that everything will be contained within the grounds, and there will be no big catastrophe."

In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded and caught fire, sending a cloud of radiation over much of Europe. That reactor — unlike the Fukushima one — was not housed in a sealed container, so there was no way to contain the radiation once the reactor exploded.

The reactor in trouble has already leaked some radiation: Before the explosion, operators had detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.

An evacuation area around the plant was expanded to a radius of 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the six miles (10 kilometers) before. People in the expanded area were advised to leave quickly; 51,000 residents were previously evacuated.

"Everyone wants to get out of the town. But the roads are terrible," said Reiko Takagi, a middle-aged woman, standing outside a taxi company. "It is too dangerous to go anywhere. But we are afraid that winds may change and bring radiation toward us."

The transport ministry said all highways from Tokyo leading to quake-hit areas were closed, except for emergency vehicles. Mobile communications were spotty and calls to the devastated areas were going unanswered.

Local TV stations broadcast footage of people lining up for water and food such as rice balls. In Fukushima, city officials were handing out bottled drinks, snacks and blankets. But there were large areas that were surrounded by water and were unreachable.

One hospital in Miyagi prefecture was seen surrounded by water. The staff had painted an SOS on its rooftop and were waving white flags.

Technologically advanced Japan is well prepared for quakes and its buildings can withstand strong jolts, even a temblor like Friday's, which was the strongest the country has experienced since official records started in the late 1800s. What was beyond human control was the killer tsunami that followed.

Japan's worst previous quake was a magnitude 8.3 temblor in Kanto that killed 143,000 people in 1923, according to the USGS. A magnitude 7.2 quake in Kobe killed 6,400 people in 1995.

Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire" — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 percent of the world's quakes occur, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake that shook central Chile in February 2010 also generated a tsunami and killed 524 people.

Hal-9000
03-12-2011, 07:03 PM
My brother is currently in Hawaii with his wife, having their honeymoon.

Earlier I had reported that he texted me on Thursday for my birthday and all was well.I guess about an hour after he sent the texts, everyone in the hotel was evacuated to higher ground.
They went up on the mountainside to some sort of open air amphitheater and had to sleep in theater seats outdoors for the night.One of the hotels on the beach had been washed away when they
returned yesterday morning.All is well now, I just got off the phone with him.

He said the most surreal thing was seeing an international warning sign for tsunamis on the beach, featuring a stick man running from a wave.They thought the image was funny as it looked like the guy was running into the wave.They took a picture of his wife standing in front of the sign...3 hours before they were evacuated because of a real tsunami.

Max
03-13-2011, 07:11 PM
The news just seems to be getting worse and worse :sad2:

SENDAI, Japan – The estimated death toll from Japan's disasters climbed past 10,000 Sunday as authorities raced to combat the threat of multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns and hundreds of thousands of people struggled to find food and water. The prime minister said it was the nation's worst crisis since World War II.

Nuclear plant operators worked frantically to try to keep temperatures down in several reactors crippled by the earthquake and tsunami, wrecking at least two by dumping sea water into them in last-ditch efforts to avoid meltdowns. Officials warned of a second explosion but said it would not pose a health threat.

Near-freezing temperatures compounded the misery of survivors along hundreds of miles (kilometers) of the northeastern coast battered by the tsunami that smashed inland with breathtaking fury. Rescuers pulled bodies from mud-covered jumbles of wrecked houses, shattered tree trunks, twisted cars and tangled power lines while survivors examined the ruined remains.

One rare bit of good news was the rescue of a 60-year-old man swept away by the tsunami who clung to the roof of his house for two days until a military vessel spotted him waving a red cloth about 10 miles (15 kilometers) offshore.

The death toll surged because of a report from Miyagi, one of the three hardest hit states. The police chief told disaster relief officials more than 10,000 people were killed, police spokesman Go Sugawara told The Associated Press. That was an estimate — only 400 people have been confirmed dead in Miyagi, which has a population of 2.3 million.

According to officials, more than 1,400 people were confirmed dead — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and more than 1,000 were missing in Friday's disasters. Another 1,700 were injured.

For Japan, one of the world's leading economies with ultramodern infrastructure, the disasters plunged ordinary life into nearly unimaginable deprivation.

Hundreds of thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centers that were cut off from rescuers, aid and electricity. At least 1.4 million households had gone without water since the quake struck and some 1.9 million households were without electricity.

While the government doubled the number of soldiers deployed in the aid effort to 100,000 and sent 120,000 blankets, 120,000 bottles of water and 29,000 gallons (110,000 liters) of gasoline plus food to the affected areas, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said electricity would take days to restore. In the meantime, he said, electricity would be rationed with rolling blackouts to several cities, including Tokyo.

"This is Japan's most severe crisis since the war ended 65 years ago," Kan told reporters, adding that Japan's future would be decided by its response.

In Rikuzentakata, a port city of over 20,000 virtually wiped out by the tsunami, Etsuko Koyama escaped the water rushing through the third floor of her home but lost her grip on her daughter's hand and has not found her.

"I haven't given up hope yet," Koyama told public broadcaster NHK, wiping tears from her eyes. "I saved myself, but I couldn't save my daughter."

A young man described what ran through his mind before he escaped in a separate rescue. "I thought to myself, ah, this is how I will die," Tatsuro Ishikawa, his face bruised and cut, told NHK as he sat in striped hospital pajamas.

Japanese officials raised their estimate Sunday of the quake's magnitude to 9.0, a notch above the U.S. Geological Survey's reading of 8.9. Either way, it was the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan, which lies on a seismically active arc. A volcano on the southern island of Kyushu — hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the quake' epicenter — also resumed spewing ash and rock Sunday after a couple of quiet weeks, Japan's weather agency said.

Dozens of countries have offered assistance. Two U.S. aircraft carrier groups were off Japan's coast and ready to help. Helicopters were flying from one of the carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan, delivering food and water in Miyagi.

Two other U.S. rescue teams of 72 personnel each and rescue dogs arrived Sunday, as did a five-dog team from Singapore.

Still, large areas of the countryside remained surrounded by water and unreachable. Fuel stations were closed, though at some, cars waited in lines hundreds of vehicles long.

The United States and a several countries in Europe urged their citizens to avoid travel to Japan. France took the added step of suggesting people leave Tokyo in case radiation reached the city.

Community after community traced the vast extent of the devastation.

In the town of Minamisanrikucho, 10,000 people — nearly two-thirds of the population — have not been heard from since the tsunami wiped it out, a government spokesman said. NHK showed only a couple concrete structures still standing, and the bottom three floors of those buildings gutted. One of the few standing was a hospital, and a worker told NHK that hospital staff rescued about a third of the patients.

In the hard-hit port city of Sendai, firefighters with wooden picks dug through a devastated neighborhood. One of them yelled: "A corpse." Inside a house, he had found the body of a gray-haired woman under a blanket.

A few minutes later, the firefighters spotted another — that of a man in black fleece jacket and pants, crumpled in a partial fetal position at the bottom of a wooden stairwell. From outside, while the top of the house seemed almost untouched, the first floor where the body was had been inundated. A minivan lay embedded in one outer wall, which had been ripped away, pulverized beside a mangled bicycle.

The man's neighbor, 24-year-old Ayumi Osuga, dug through the remains of her own house, her white mittens covered by dark mud.

Osuga said she had been practicing origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into figures, with her three children when the quake stuck. She recalled her husband's shouted warning from outside: "'GET OUT OF THERE NOW!'"

She gathered her children — aged 2 to 6 — and fled in her car to higher ground with her husband. They spent the night in a hilltop home belonging to her husband's family about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.

"My family, my children. We are lucky to be alive," she said.

"I have come to realize what is important in life," Osuga said, nervously flicking ashes from a cigarette onto the rubble at her feet as a giant column of black smoke billowed in the distance.

As night fell and temperatures dropped to freezing in Sendai, people who had slept in underpasses or offices the past two nights gathered for warmth in community centers, schools and City Hall.

At a large refinery on the outskirts of the city, 100-foot (30-meter) -high bright orange flames rose in the air, spitting out dark plumes of smoke. The facility has been burning since Friday. The fire's roar could be heard from afar. Smoke burned the eyes and throat, and a gaseous stench hung in the air.

In the small town of Tagajo, also near Sendai, dazed residents roamed streets cluttered with smashed cars, broken homes and twisted metal.

Residents said the water surged in and quickly rose higher than the first floor of buildings. At Sengen General Hospital, the staff worked feverishly to haul bedridden patients up the stairs one at a time. With the halls now dark, those who can leave have gone to the local community center.

"There is still no water or power, and we've got some very sick people in here," said hospital official Ikuro Matsumoto.

Police cars drove slowly through the town and warned residents through loudspeakers to seek higher ground, but most simply stood by and watched them pass.

In the town of Iwaki, there was no electricity, stores were closed and residents left as food and fuel supplies dwindled. Local police took in about 90 people and gave them blankets and rice balls, but there was no sign of government or military aid trucks.

lost in melb.
03-14-2011, 09:32 AM
New footage coming in: another town wiped out


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlOeWENs5Dk

AntZ
03-20-2011, 01:53 PM
Guam Global Hawks Surveying Earthquake Damage

Mar 18, 2011




By Amy Butler

http://minimages.com/images/11867956081629883529.jpg

Two of the Air Force’s new Global Hawk Block 30 aircraft are conducting imagery intelligence missions over Japan following the massive earthquake that struck off the island chain’s northeast coast March 11.

This marks Global Hawk’s fourth region of operations abroad, including the Pacific, Central Command (supporting Iraq and Afghanistan), European Command and Southern Command (over Mexico and South America). Talks are now underway to potentially fly new Block 30 Global Hawks from NAS Sigonella in Italy to monitor activities in Libya, Bahrain and other areas of unrest in Africa and the Middle East, according to program officials.

The two UAVs are flying out of Andersen AFB in Guam and providing imagery along with U-2 aircraft out of Osan Air Base in South Korea. The second of the aircraft arrived there in early January, says Gen. Gary North, commander of Pacific Air Forces.

Sensor suite

The Global Hawks over Japan are the Block 30I configuration, carrying the Enhanced Integrated Sensor Suite (EISS) capable of collecting images of wide swaths of land. The imagery will be digitally relayed for processing. The U-2 is employing the mainstay Optical Bar Camera, which can also provide high-resolution, wide-area views of the terrain. This camera, however, employs wet film, which must be sent back to Beale AFB, Calif., for development and processing prior to analysis.

While the aircraft are both surveying areas wrecked by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, they can also be helpful with the growing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s northeast coast.

Global Hawk’s EISS can provide infrared imagery of the plant, which is helping workers find the hottest areas of the nuclear reactors — some of which are thought to either be melting down or on the cusp of such a disaster.

Efforts now are focused on cooling the reactors’ fuel rods, though the plant has had interruptions in power supply and suffered damage from multiple hydrogen explosions. One issue is knowing where water is needed most to cool the most vulnerable fuel rods. Though Global Hawk is capable of standing off a significant distance from any radiation that may be contaminating the atmosphere, one program expert notes that the Air Force does have decontamination procedures that can be put in place once the aircraft lands, if needed.

Six versions

Meanwhile, six versions of the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk are operating out of Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates; the high-altitude unmanned air system arrived there nearly a decade ago to support growing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. They include three Air Force Block 10 aircraft, a single Navy Block 10 aircraft outfitted with maritime surveillance software and two Block 20 UAVs outfitted with the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node relay system.

As operations ramp up abroad, Air Force officials are putting the finishing touches on a report on the initial operational test and evaluation phase for the Block 20/30 aircraft. The program has suffered delays and come under fire during the past year for cost growth.

However, Air Force acquisition chief David Van Buren says the problems are turning around. “I was unhappy. I was unhappy with out own government program office,” he said this month. “I’m happy to say we have reversed the course with Northrop and its suppliers” on cost. He says that together with Northrop Grumman he has identified about $39 million in savings for the program.