161–170 of 269 posts
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I don't want to be disrespectful to anybody affected by the earthquake but your comment made me remember this: http://xkcd.com/723/
I actually first heard about this earthquake on Twitter (all eyewitness reports, no second hand information). I immediately checked all news sites I could think of (European, US) but none were yet reporting on it.
I just talked to my parents in Hawaii, there's a tsunami warning for 3 am HST. I reminded my dad to sandbag the doors of his restaurant in Waikiki (Vit's Hawaiian Steakhouse) before he closes for the night. It's just outside of the "tsunami zone" in Waikiki, so I know my dad will probably be working until the police make him evacuate. He did that on the last tsunami warning, and Vit's was pretty much the only restaur…
I'm still feeling shakes every few minutes. It's like living in a house on a block of jello. Long rolling waves. I'm in central Tokyo and our china cabinet was shaken pretty badly: http://www.flickr.com/photos/poswald/5516954100/in/photostre... I know some people up in sendai that I'm a bit worried about.
My office is on the 7th floor of a building in Yoyogi. Monitors are scattered everywhere, and our breakroom is effectively destroyed. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but I'm really glad this quake wasn't any stronger... I've been through a lot of quakes here, and this is the first time I thought I might be going home in a black bag.
It was crazy scary, and I was all the way down in Nagoya. There doesn't seem to be too much damage in Miyagi (where the earthquake was) but some fires broke out apparently. Luckily, it seemed to be a long, hard earthquake rather than a short hard earthquake, which means that buildings are able to withstand the shaking better. The shaking went on for about 3 minutes here, and there were some after shocks that lasted f…
PGV (peak ground velocity) is a more accurate way to estimate the strain put on infrastructure. This shakemap shows the preliminary recordings: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake...
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Besides what patio11 said, there is something similar to the US National Alert System which gets used quite often. It puts alerts on the top of every TV channel when an earthquake starts... unfortunately my TV then fell off the cabinet so I took that as an alert and climbed under my table.
Right about the tv. I was just thinking "what if it had been in the night?" People will be asleep so if there's any window of warning available, how can they get the message? On CNN the newscaster is repeatedly mentioning how people on the ground are waiting in line to use the pay phone to notify loved ones etc... I use my phone as an alarm so that's why I just thought it might be helpful if there was a public alert…
People outside of Tokyo Disneyland http://twitpic.com/48dy7s
So now you know the full extent of the disaster.
OMG! This feels like 2012 (the movie). Seeing that tsunami is breathtaking. I sincerely hope lives aren't lost.
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It's because everyone in Japan started sending SMSes to everyone they knew practically before the shaking stopped and that DOSed the network. This happens fairly regularly (e.g. for a few minutes after midnight on New Years, when a large portion of Japanese people send well wishes within the same 15 second window).
From my experiences in Germany, SMSes send around midnight New Year did sometimes take several hours to arrive.
Japan has declared a state of emergency because of the failure of the cooling system at one nuclear plant, according to the Associated Press. Officials say there has been no leak of radiation. Let's hope this does not get any worse than it is right now.