Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[centsworth_II]

Thoughts go out to our friends in Japan. Pandaneko has been helping out here with translation of Jaxa documents lately and he and Subaru have participated in the Hayabusa threads in the past. Any other UMSF members in Japan?

[pandaneko]

First of all our thanks go out to all those countries who are helping us at the moment. What follows is my accout of what it felt like and a few things I have noticed.

I was probably 800km away from the first epicentre (and there were two more breakages in succession over a distance of about 500km). Each breakage lasted about 100 seconds.

I and all others who have mobile access knew that a very strong tremor was approaching because we get an automatic e-mail warning when your area is going to be affected a tremor with (shaking) severity larger than 4. I had, I think, about one minute warning. All the tremors I had experienced until that day were under 3 minus. This time, I experienced 5 plus.

However, as far as I am concerend it was a very strange one indeed. All those quakes I had experienced were of short duration, sometime a fraction of a second and were all kicks, impulses lasting a few seconds at the most.

This one was totally different. It was not a very violent tremor, perhaps it was, but I did not feel ferociously violent elements in it. Instead, the ground rolled a great deal, not up and down, but sideways, and lasting for 5 mininutes. It seemed not ending at all.

My guess now is that all those higher frequency tremors failed to reach my area. I was standing by the side of my car and I did see it shake violently side to side and sometimes up and down.

Now, tsunami, it is a Japanese word, meaning narrow bay tidal waves. The areas most affected by the tsunami were protected against severe tsunamis. This is because historically these areas were frequently devastated by tsunamis. There was one town which was famous for its protective barriers.

Many overseas observers had visited this town in order to plan for their own barriers. This town had two barriers in pararell, each reaching to the height of 10 m. However, they did not work at all as the actual tide height easily exceeded 20m, wiping out the whole town.

You could have planned for 20m waves or more, but there is this cost issue.

Now my serious thought about evacuation. Normally, they suppluy blanckets and they usually arrive too late, say 5,6 days after the shake and that was the case this time. So, what people did was to rip off school and gym curtains to wrap themselves (no water, no heating, no gas, no electricity, no food and snowing outside with temp down to minus 10 C, of course).

I am now convinced that sleeping bags should be supplied, because with blanckets cold air still sneaks in.

Regulated power cust are imposed now and I went out to buy battery-powered fluorescent lamps, but they were all sold out. So, I had to buy Coleman's buthane lamps, which turned out to be rather good. All the rooms in my house are (electricity) air-conditined and the living room has an additional gas heating system.

As it turned out this gas heating system did not work when power is down. Kitchen gas system does work. My wife was just recently talking about changing our kichen heating to induction heating and I am glad that we did not do that. For a start, it does provide some heat and for that matter Coleman's also provide some heating. That is good, because under this controlled power cuts you lose 7 hours of heating/day (usually 3.5 hours, but double that when it is cold and that is exactly when you need heating!).

About nuclear reactors, I am glad that hydrogen explosions took place. If they did not happen there is no easy way to pour water into those pools. This shows that you need to prepare for even unimaginable situations when trying to use nuclear reactors.

Thanking once again for your concern and help.

Pandaneko