Originally posted by DaveT
Holy balls at the new footage CNN is showing from TV Asahi. The river raging over into buildings and all the boats just flying into buildings and bridges and just tossing cars and boats like they are matchboxes. I probably sounded drunk in that sentence.
I work in the video game industry (media side) and have tons of friends over in Japan. All are safe, except a friend of mine cannot get a hold of her parents still. But they live in an area w/o power or anything right now apparently. Family is trying to get to the town, but nearly impossible by car. And trains are out of service of course.
Originally posted by igottaknow
Lira is your atheist status still intacted?
Pretty much, yeah.
Here's what I have to say on this, by the way:
quote:
Sorry if I made you guys worry (I tried to tag everyone that messaged me). Apparently, the plate tectonic I'm in is more hyperactive than me. Here's my description of the 2011 Sendai earthquake: I was in relatively safe area, did feel the quakes, and watched the news as they happened. And sort of felt them. I'm going to keep my account of the events as light-hearted and humorous as possible, not for disrespect for the dead, but because, as William James once said "good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us". Besides, my message is a rather upbeat one. Namely, that people are bloody awesome!
Overview
One island, two plates.
They don't get along.
Here's what happened in a nutshell: the Japanese have been waiting for an epic earthquake for ages because the main island (Honshuu) spans across two different tectonic plates that have very different goals in life and want to go places... and they can't agree on what places they want to go to, so they inevitably clash every now and then. That's why they're still clashing (as I type, there's another aftershock near Tokyo)... and that's why they violently bumped into one another the day before yesterday in a way they had never done before as far as we know. They had issues and it was about time they sorted them out: there were foreshocks and aftershocks, it's not like no one could see it coming.
The epicentre was somewhere near Sendai (hence the name and the chaos there), in North-East Japan. It's a rather calm place, and the only time I ever visited the city I struggled to find something to do there (yet, for whatever reason, that's where I was most warmly welcomed). And, they're ready for quakes there as much as everywhere else in the country. Japanese people know they live in an old land that suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and to be fair, the earhquake itself wasn't the main problem. When you look at the areas that were not hit by the tsunami, you'd never tell one of the most powerful quakes ever recorded happened there.
My account of what happened
No safety helmets for you, staff!
When the major quake struck off Japan, I was fighting for my life in a blizzard in the mountains of Nagano. Even if the ground did shake, I was all covered in snow trying to walk uphill (I thought it would be a good idea to do some snowboarding during a blizzard), so I couldn't tell what was going on: I looked up and all I saw was white. I looked down and the ground was all white as well. It wasn't until I got the the ski resort that my fiancée hugged me and told me how glad she was I was safe. We looked at the telly and saw (live, no less) the tsunami hit Sendai and surrounding areas. It was heart-wrenching, and we were cheering for the cars that were driving off the coast. We did see a couple of moving vehicles get wiped out by the tide, and that's when we realised how serious it was. The earthquake had hit one hour earlier, and tsunami warnings were broadcast all over the country. However, it's hard to evacuate a whole city in less than an hour, specially because the elderly, the children, and the stubborn are pretty hard to move.
Then the unimaginable happened.
I had just experienced one minor earthquake in my lifetime, back in Brasilia, and I thought I wouldn't get to feel a thing this time. However, the country was hit by a series of aftershocks, and they seemed to spread westwards - so, in the wee hours of the morning, a very startled fiancée woke me up with the word: "Terremoto" (Terra is Portuguese for Earth and Moto means motorbike... which meant the tectonic Hell's Angels had just arrived).
It always pissed me right off because whenever I asked someone about what an earthquake feels like, they'd tell me to stop being silly. No one ever told me what an actual earthquake felt like. Imagine you're inside a car after a major game and hooligans are trying to turn your car upside down. Except you're not really inside a car, but in a planet. And the only hooligans are the plate tectonics beneath you. Everything shakes sideways, and so do you. It's awesome! We turned on the TV: an aftershock had just hit Nagano (though my fiancée was reluctant to believe it was an aftershock as no one on the telly said it was). 6 on the Richter scale. Hell yeah, a blizzard and an earthquake in less than 24 hours, now that's what I call a day! And then, a few minutes later, I felt yet another quake. This time around, I was puzzled: How many aftershocks can there be?
Apparently, lots.
It's been two days since the big hit and tsunami warnings are still being issued. Like I said, I was watching TV when I started writing this and there was yet another earthquake near Tokyo. I got used to them by now... and the natives look as unfazed as I am now.
On our way back from Nagano to Nagoya, my fiancée and I searched for any signs of a major earthquake. We found nothing. As a matter of fact, everything's back to normal unless you're too close to the tsunami-stricken areas. Phones aren't working properly, but that's because everyone was in a rush to tell everyone else they're okay. 1700 people disappeared/perished in a densely populated country with 127 million inhabitants during one of the greatest natural disasters ever recorded (Haiti has 20x more casualties and their population is just a tenth of that). Help is on the way and it's also very neatly organised. Food and shelter was ready in a matter of hours.
If you're worried, chill out. If you're nervous, calm down. We should mourn the fallen, but we should also recognise people are pretty damn awesome when given the right resources (which Haiti unfortunately lacked). I'm okay, my fiancée is okay and, odds are, everyone else you know around here is also okay. Nature is unforgiving, but casualties aside, we got the upper hand this weekend.
Can someone explain that radiation map in more practical terms? What's the amount of RADS that can cause radiation sickness, etc. Or is it expected to ever make it to the East coast?
jonSun
quote:
Originally posted by srussell0018
Can someone explain that radiation map in more practical terms? What's the amount of RADS that can cause radiation sickness, etc. Or is it expected to ever make it to the East coast?
I pulled that off another forum so I don't know how accurate it is. But here is a site that shows the pac jet stream.
Short video with clips of informations of what happens with the body with different RAD levels.
srussell0018
quote:
Originally posted by jester
Short video with clips of informations of what happens with the body with different RAD levels.
:nervous: So up to half of the people exposed to 750 RADS could die without intensive medical treatment. Very scary, but actually very lucky that that amount of radiation is having to cross an entire ocean, instead of going west.
