Big earthquake in Japan

[Eiffel]

The last days were a nightmare, i wish the things will be ok soon.

[steven]

Originally Posted by MMM

There is one flight a day from Tokyo to Portland. Today was the second day the flight was flown in a row. On the local news they showed a Japanese woman with her two sons. She said they had "evacuated" from Tokyo. She said Narita was full of thousands of people trying to evacuate. She also said the shelves in grocery stores and drug stores were empty. She couldn't even buy toilet paper in or around Tokyo.

Is this true?

I don't know about that specific case, but I do have some friends in Tokyo who took some pictures of completely empty grocery store shelves. They are talking about it a bit on the news as well.

[Eiffel]

Originally Posted by ajisai666

I just watched a small clip of a video that said since it might be raining and/or snowing tonight in tokyo that the radioactive materials might seep into the soil. Anyone know anymore details about this??

I don't know how it works but i think it's worst if it rains, stay at home. In Ukraine there were leopard areas, i suppose where the rains felt.

[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by MMM

There is one flight a day from Tokyo to Portland. Today was the second day the flight was flown in a row. On the local news they showed a Japanese woman with her two sons. She said they had "evacuated" from Tokyo. She said Narita was full of thousands of people trying to evacuate. She also said the shelves in grocery stores and drug stores were empty. She couldn't even buy toilet paper in or around Tokyo.

Is this true?

From friends, family, and colleagues in Tokyo and the surrounding area, it seems the story went sort of like this;

The earthquake shut everything down and caused fires
That calmed down, and things went back to almost normal
There was talk of an electricity shortage, so people started buying batteries
They implemented the rolling blackouts, so the trains were reduced or taken offline
Despite only being in 3 hour blocks, people panicked and started buying up all the dry foods as possible
They find that there is nowhere to safely store deliveries of gasoline, so rumors start of a possible shortage
People go crazy and start hoarding gasoline, triggering a real shortage that leads to implementing a ration system... That triggers even more panic, and people driving around to every gas station they can find to buy more and more gas and get around the ration. I`m hearing more and more about people who filled up their cars and then drained the tank into gasoline containers, and then went back for more... Even if they never drive.
The shortages due to hoarding panic people more, so they are buying up every delivery coming in and hoarding it - friends speak of obasan buying 20+ packages of 12 roll toilet paper, etc

Those we know in Tokyo are actually finding it easier to order stuff online and have it delivered, as the majority of the shortages seem to be panic-hoarding behavior rather than an actual real shortage (other than gasoline, as the tanks to store it have been damaged, but even that wouldn`t have been as bad if everyone hadn`t felt the need to fill up everything they owned).

So... Everyone is hoarding gas, making it harder to deliver the goods (that are plentiful to the west) to Tokyo, sparking more panic, and more panic buying of gas and goods... making them even more scarce... repeat repeat repeat


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ETA;

So, from my understanding, Tokyo and other big urbanized areas are not that bad (considering the quake and tsunamis) but everything else has suffered major destruction, right?

Not quite. The earthquake was NORTH of Tokyo, with the worst shaking far north. The damage from the earthquake itself was bad, but not absolutely horrific. They are currently estimating that the number who died in the earthquake itself as in the 150~250 range. Bad, but not REALLY bad. It was the tsunami that has caused the terrible damage, and as a tsunami is, well, a tsunami - only the coast was hit by it.
So the areas suffering horrible damage are fairly limited to the coastal villages, towns, and cities north of Tokyo.
There is a huge amount of Japan that suffered no significant damage, and huge areas that did not feel the quake at all to the west of Tokyo.

This has been a horrible disaster, but in terms of where was hit - it was a pretty small part of Japan that suffered the real damage. You`d think, based on some of the overseas news, that most of Japan was in ruins, but that is very far from the case.

Yes, but that's only in the more urbanized areas, isn't? Unfortunately.

I think in general the image of natural disasters is shaped by those that are familiar... In the case of large scale events like this, it seems the common image in the mind of the public is falling down buildings in the middle east. Enough people have commented to me about the difference in the appearance of survivors that I am pretty sure this is the case. They expect to see people covered in dust from disintegrated concrete buildings, in a desert like setting. The environment in Japan is different, and the disaster itself was of a different type. Most of the people who survived weren`t pulling themselves out from the rubble - they fled and so were not washed away. They were never "dirty" to begin with... And while there is plenty of mud, there isn`t concrete dust floating around.

[MMM]

Thank you, Nyororin. I was trying to figure out why there would be shortages where things should be in plentiful supply. I didn't consider the hoarding factor.

[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by MMM

Thank you, Nyororin. I was trying to figure out why there would be shortages where things should be in plentiful supply. I didn't consider the hoarding factor.

Imagine all the おばさん who buy 10 packs of something because the saw something on the news say it was healthy, and who will buy and extra 5 packs of something they`ll never use just because it is on sale... being told by media rumors that they might not be able to buy any at ALL if they don`t run out and buy it RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

And imagine that on a Tokyo-wide scale.

That is pretty much what is at the root of the shortages, from what I understand. They all ran out RIGHT NOW!!! and bought up all they could find, making a real shortage. So everyone else who wouldn`t normally hoard without a really good reason has kind of been pushed into it.

The amount of negativity I have seen being expressed toward the people who are running around to get around the gas rationing (after filling 3 or 4 poly tanks with gas before the rationing, CAUSING the rationing to begin with) and the older women who are buying up toilet paper by the pallet has been pretty impressive.

I`m finding the whole toilet paper thing fascinating, as it is stemming from the memories of the shortage in the 1973 oil crisis thing... which was also not a REAL shortage, but a hoarding issue. However, in people`s minds, "gasoline shortage" is linked to a lack of toilet paper - even if there is no real "gasoline shortage", and the last case didn`t have an effect on toilet paper production - just triggered rumors that caused a mass hoarding event...

[GoNative]

I am very thankful we haven't experienced power blackouts up this way. Last night got to -10 degrees celcius here. Would have been hard without heating! I see that it is quite cold and snowing today in many of the affected areas. We've sent off all the spare blankets we had already. They are going to need them!

[termogard]

I don't know whether it's an example of fearmongering and alarmism or solid calculation :

[GoNative]

Originally Posted by termogard

I don't know whether it's an example of fearmongering and alarmism or solid calculation :

I went to their website and they have posted this on it

DISCLAIMER: Australian Radiation Services is aware of information about radioactive contamination being spread from the Japanese nuclear reactor incident released under the ARS logo and name. We wish to be clear that this information has not originated from ARS and as such distance ourselves from any such misinformation.

So it would appear that yes it is a complete fabrication and part of the fearmongering.

[termogard]

Originally Posted by GoNative

I went to their website and they have posted this on it......
So it would appear that yes it is a complete fabrication and part of the fearmongering.

Good.

And this one incident took place near my hometown in 1985 :

Date: 10 August 1985

Location: Chazhma Bay, near Vladivostok, Russia, USSR, aboard USSR submarine K-431

Type of event: reactor accident during refueling

Description:

An explosion occurred during refueling of the submarine K-431 at Chazhma Bay, Vladivostok. The K-431, completed around 1965 as unit K-31, was a Project 675 (Echo II) class submarine with two pressurized water reactors, each 70 MWt capacity and using 20% enriched uranium as fuel. (Note that some sources confuse this submarine with K-314, a Project 671 or Victor I class submarine launched in 1972 and withdrawn from service after a reactor accident in December 1985.) On 10 August 1985, the submarine was being refueled at the Chazhma Bay naval facility near Vladivostock. The submarine had been refueled and the reactor tank lid was being replaced. The lid was laid incorrectly and had to be lifted again with the control rods attached. A beam was supposed to prevent the lid from being lifted too far, but this beam was positioned incorrectly, and the lid with control rods were lifted too far up. At 10:55 AM the starboard reactor became supercritical, resulting in a criticality excursion of about 5x1018 fissions and a thermal/steam explosion. The explosion expelled the new load of fuel, destroyed the machine enclosures, rupturing the submarine's pressure hull and aft bulkhead, and partially destroyed the fuelling shack, with the shack's roof falling 70 meters away in the water. A fire followed which was extinguished after 4 hours, after which assessment of the radioactive contamination began. Most of the radioactive debris fell within 50-100 meters of the submarine, but a cloud of radioactive gas and particulates blew to the northwest across a 6-km stretch of the Dunai Peninsula, missing the town of Shkotovo-22, 1.5 km from the dock. The contaminated forest area was later surveyed as 2 square km in a swath 3.5 km long and 200-650 meters wide. Estimates initial radioactive release was about 2 MCi of noble gases and 5 MCi of other fission products, but most of this was short-lived isotopes; the estimated release inventory one hour after the accident was about 1000 Ci of non-noble fission products. In part because the reactor did not contain spent fuel, the fraction of biologically active isotopes was far smaller than in the case of the Chernobyl reactor accident.

Ten naval personnel were killed (8 officers and 2 enlisted men), probably by the explosion itself and not from radiation injuries. Radiation injuries were observed in 49 people, with 10 developing radiation sickness; the latter figure included mostly firefighters, some of whom sustained doses up to 220 rad external and 400 rem to the thyroid gland. Of the 2,000 involved in cleanup operations, 290 were exposed to high levels of radiation compared to normal standards.

High-level waste gathered during clean-up operations were placed in temporary disposal sites. Due to the rapid decay of most of the reactor products and the cleanup operations, some dockyard facilities were able to resume operations four days later. About two months post-accident the radioactivity in water in the cove was comparable to background levels, and 5-7 months post-accident the radiation levels were considered normal throughout the dock area. The damaged submarine was towed to Pavlovsk Bay and berthed there.

Consequences: 10 fatalities (probably due to non-radiation injuries), 49 injuries.

Source

MiniChernobyl Plant failure, in other words......