Japan Quake

[beth_leonard]

I spent far too much of today reading news and watching videos about the Japanese earthquake. I'm really glad Japan is not Haiti in terms of building standards. I pray for those who lost lives/property in the quake, and I give thanks for those who did not.

I'm also giving thanks good building standards here too. Someday our time will come, and I can only hope that our buildings will stand up as well as those in much of Japan did. We had our house looked at a few years ago, and it's bolted to the foundation and generally well-reinforced. The contractor who looked at it found a few things that could be better, but I've never actually had the work done. The e-mail has been sitting in my inbox for over 2 years now, just scheduling it never seems to be a high priority.

I really need to finish earthquake-proffing our shelves. I bought the hardware several years ago, but the only ones I've done are those in my bedroom and office.

The red cross is accepting donations, and if I could find my phone I'd text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation several times until our balance was back down. The phone costs $5/month and minutes cost about $0.20/minute and come out of that amount, so it builds up reserves and I bleed them off the phone during natural disasters. I'll inquire at church as well. One does not recover from disasters of this magnitude without help. One never really recovers emotionally.

I'm trying to decide about the potential reactor meltdown. I can't trust the news coverage. So much of it reminds me of this XKCD comic. I hope there is nothing to fear.

--Beth

Comments

[elissali.livejournal.com]

Just a side note: we will never have as large earthquakes here as they do in Japan, which is sitting on top of several subduction zones. I wish I remembered the estimate one of my committee members made of how big an earthquake the San Andreas is physically capable of... it has to do with how long the break is, and how deep it goes, and how far things move. Because the San Andreas is a strike-slip/transform boundary (things slide past each other) there's less contact area between the plates so less area would break. in a subduction zone, which is convergent, there's a lot more contact area.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't make your home more earthquake safe. I totally commend you for both home repairs and little things like bolting bookcases, etc. I haven't gotten around to bolting the bookcases here yet, and I totally should. And part of our house (the older part) still needs to be tied down. need to step that up too.

[robszewczyk.livejournal.com]

Meltdown or no meltdown, the building has exploded and collapsed to some extent. It is important to keep things in perspective: people keep comparing it to the Three Mile Island, which really was mot that bad. Let's hope that it will be no worse than that.

[robszewczyk.livejournal.com]

I found this overview of the situation of what happened (and is likely to happen) at Fukushima power plant:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

Seems pretty level-headed and informative.

[motleypolitico.livejournal.com]

If the only thing going on there are the steam releases, I'm not worried. So much of the radioactivity in them is nitrogen with about a 6 second half-life, that simple distance really makes a lot of that moot.

The reactor 4 fire, on the other hand, could cause some more significant containment breaches, and appears to have already done so.

Hydrogen explosions from steam release, while wreaking havoc on the remains of containment buildings, still don't fall into my huge worry zone. Yes, it removes an imperfect containment barrier, but as long as the reactors are kept under control with steam releases that go boom, it's still vastly better than having intact containment buildings, and a radically overheated reactor.

Short form, the fire worries me, the vented steam/hydrogen explosions don't.