Japan News (4/22)
Apr. 22nd, 2011 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerVery hit or miss collection of odds and ends from the Japanese news. Several stations, including the national station, now have regular earthquake news times blocked out. However, I don't watch everything, I don't take notes on everything, and I've got other things going on. So, don't expect this to be comprehensive or particularly representative -- it's just things that caught my attention and I made a note about them. And sorry about the length -- I didn't get around to writing them up until today.
4/17
Someone talking about what's going on with the reactors. I noticed that his diagram shows both the mega-float (identified as such) and a large tank on the land, with two differently colored arrows slashing across into them. I don't think he explained them, though, because he was talking about something else.
4/18
A cruise liner, one of those multiple story buildings on a ship, pulled into Kyushu, the southern island, empty. Apparently the normal load of vacationers scheduled to be on it, mostly from China, all canceled. There's concern that the tourist trade is going to take a big hit this year, even in the parts of Japan that haven't had trouble with the quakes and tsunami.
This was an interview with a 62-year-old farmer. He's complaining that his house was destroyed by the earthquake, he still owes money for the loan, and now he can't sell mushrooms. He points out that his mushrooms are raised in a greenhouse, about 76 km southwest of Fukushima -- well outside the evacuation circles and the plots of measured radioactivity levels. However, he is still inside one of the prefectures that the government has embargoed. This led into a larger piece about farmers being upset with the embargoes.
Somewhere in the quake/tsunami area, near one of the shelters, they showed a group celebrating the cherry blossoms. They had drums, food, and in the background was a field of debris. A grizzled old 77-year-old told the cameras and his friends, "Step-by-step, we'll do it."
7 PM. More news about the robots. Apparently they couldn't go very far in number three, but the measured levels of were 28 milli sieverts, with a hotspot around 57. More extensive mapping in number one had a peak of 49, with 20s and tens. They said the average was about 28 to 29.
A little piece about the volunteer effort. They included shots of a map of northern Japan, with the edge spotted with dots. Apparently these are ongoing efforts. www.jpn-civil.net
I'm not sure of the area, but they were talking about over 300 condominium complexes being condemned. They showed video of one, where a large right hand section of the building had simply leaned away from the main building -- leaving corridors and so forth gaping on open air. One of the problems of course is that people want to go back in and grab stuff. I don't know -- if I looked at a building and saw that it was in two pieces, leaning away from each other, I might just decide that I didn't really need that stuff?
They showed one of the emergency centers closing. The 400 people who had been staying there have been relocated to hotels, houses, and so forth. They said there are still 136,299 in shelters.
Ouch. One of the ports had 37 big fishing boats. They're reporting 30 of them are destroyed -- mostly beached, several burned. They showed some of the video from the early 3/11 evening, with something burning on the seacoast -- that was the boats. They showed the burned wreckage. And the real bad part is that several of these are from the Hokkaido fishing fleet. Apparently they winter in this area, and hadn't yet gone north.
4/19
One town, not one of the bigger ones, estimates they have 790,000 tons of debris to clear.
They've recovered 168 bodies from inside the 20 km perimeter around Fukushima.
In one of the towns, they show 120 m x 60 m mountain of junk. They've got dump trucks pulling up to it and adding to it, backhoes working on the pile itself. This is the stuff that's been sorted and is ready for disposal, if they can figure out where to get rid of it. They laughingly show that there's also a large ship in the middle of town -- with a red bulbous prow that would normally be underwater, leaning a little bit sideways. My impression is that they aren't sure what to do with that.
There's a volunteer running around to the shelters with a truck full of washers and dryers. He shows he's got natural gas tanks and a generator to run things. Apparently he pulls into a parking lot, hands out numbers, and washes and dries all day -- for free. When he talked with the reporter, he said he watched the news and decided he could do this -- so he put together his truck, and he's out washing.
They're looking at the Sendai railroad yard. Lots of track bent and twisted. They're predicting it will be autumn, roughly, before they get straightened out.
There's that 10 year estimate to clean up again.
And in Tokyo, there seems to be a lot of refusal to buy. One of the companies shows that last year's little tiny fish -- white, about an inch long, commonly used a number of ways -- that has been frozen simply is not selling because it's from northeastern Japan. Apparently people are worried that it might be radioactive. Since it was harvested well before the earthquake, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but the vendors say even with reduced prices, no one is buying.
4/21 (sorry, skipped a day)
In one of the towns, they've got water back. The woman runs the water in the sink, then tells the reporter that mostly she's happy that she'll be able to take a bath again.
They've got a bus running in the town. It's going by fields of debris, and there aren't any passengers. The driver gets out at several spots and tells people that it's going to be running regularly, and it's free right now.
They've got part of a fish market going -- not too many fish, fishermen, or customers, but at least it's a start. They show that the dock is cracked. At this place, they've also got a robot -- American-made -- that they are using to explore the sea floor. It's like a miniature submarine, apparently with a camera. They're watching the screen and making notes about what they think is a submerged girder or something similar.
There's a little bit about an aquarium, with seals practicing their show. The young man who's putting them through their paces says they don't know what's happened. He doesn't know when they will open to the public again.
In this school, they've got three elementary or junior high schools using the same facility. They show students in classes set up in the auditorium. They're also running graduations, and trying to figure out who should move to other schools.
5:48 PM -- a short piece about a volunteer group in Yokohama, near Tokyo. They're making up boxes of vegetables, with a large message from a kid in the top of each box. They're also putting clothes and such in boxes, but they are taking each shirt, blouse, sweater, etc. and putting it in an individual clear plastic bag. On the outside of the bag, they put a wide piece of tape, and identify what's inside, which gender, and what size. The reporter explains that if you just stack things in a box, when people are getting it out, they get the other things dirty. So this group of volunteers is carefully wrapping pieces individually. They also add little messages to many of the individual bags. They also showed what amounted to personal hygiene kits -- soap, towels, toothbrush, etc. in again individual bags. The man who is leading the effort said that they are working closely with the shelters to make sure they are meeting real needs, and that the request to put it in individual bags came from the shelters.
In one of the areas, the plum trees are in bloom. People are out enjoying it, although it's apparently a mixture of evacuees and emergency shelter people, instead of the normal visitors.
There's some video of a group doing repair on railroad tracks. First they show the tracks where the bed has simply disappeared -- I'm not sure if the track has been bent way off of the bed, or the bed flooded out. Then they show them redoing the bed, setting in concrete ties, and using a really enormous jack to realign the track.
Apparently quite a few of the foreign students in the Tokyo area left for vacation and haven't come back. One of the Japanese language schools reports that of 400 scheduled students, they only have about 200.
There's a child psychologist visiting the shelters. He says he is seeing evidence of PTSD in a lot of the children. There are elementary school fourth grade and fifth grade kids that he talks to, and talks to their parents. He says they're going to need help. At one of the shelters, he invites all the children to join him. He takes them in a side room, and has them make balloon animals. He also gets out a trumpet, and they have a session of trying to blow the trumpet.
They also showed him talking with the teachers at one of the schools about signs to watch. He had three main signs, but they went too fast for me to catch. One of the teachers commented that she never expected to have to watch elementary school kids for this kind of thing.
(A little google search suggested re-experiencing the event, avoiding reminders of the trauma, and increased anxiety or emotional reactions, but I'm not sure if that was his three or not.)
I think this was training, not the real thing. Something I had never thought about -- they showed how a hospital surgery team is trained to react to earthquake. In the middle of surgery. They pushed the lights and equipment away, covered the patient. One of the nurses knelt down at the head of the patient, and grabbed his head with her hands, then held on. Basically locked his head down.
They also showed kids in an elementary school doing quake training. Either clear the walls and form a big pile, or if you're in an area with desks or tables, get underneath and hold on. It reminded me of the old "duck and cover" training (yes, I'm that old.)
Someone is estimating 20,000,000 tons of trash to be taken care of. They showed a company that does recycle board -- the chippers, pile of timber and cut trees, and a huge pile of chips, along with the machinery grinding out boards. Basically particle boards. The man who runs the company says they can only handle so much, though. He also shakes his head about separating out what they can use and the other stuff.
There's another little piece about the flags. Apparently a red flag means the building or whatever is condemned, don't mess with it. A yellow flag means you can reclaim stuff. And a green flag means it's OK. They talked with a man who said right now, most of the flags they are putting up are yellow flags.
22:37 magnitude 6 quake? Chiba, close to Tokyo, has a five. Fours and threes into Tokyo. Lots of talk about this one being relatively long?
4/22
There's a lot of talk about the new stricter evacuation rules. If I understand correctly, the government is trying to limit people wandering through the 20 kilometer area. So each family or company is supposed only have one person go in, once a day, for a short period of time. They're showing a man with his white suit, filter mask, and so forth rapidly trying to pick up things in his house. He's looking at a list on his iPhone! They also showed somebody trying to collect stuff from a company. There's also a video that's been shown a couple of times of the Prime Minister visiting one of the shelters and having a man yell at him. He listens, says he's sorry, bows.
In one of the areas just outside the evacuation area, they've got four schools that have joined together in a single facility. The teachers talk about possibly having to move again, and how do you prepare the students for that?
Hah! This morning, one of the shows had a short piece about your personal radiation monitors. There's the 29,900 unit (about $300) that shows numeric measures in a digital readout. Clips in your pocket, something like a wide flat pen. With a legend in English "This side towards body" which makes me suspect it comes from somewhere else. Or the card type, apparently from France, that has a little chip with a color dot, and a chart of various colors. I'll bet demand in the Tokyo area is still outrunning supply, though.
Incidentally, that show also had background numbers for the current period in Tokyo -- something like 19 microsevierts for the period from 3/14 to now. And foods, water, milk added another 97 or so. Which adds up to 116 -- somewhat less than you get doing the Tokyo-New York airplane flight, according to their chart.
It's going to be interesting to see how the children who have been through this grow up. I mean, when your home, family, relatives, friends disappear and shift so dramatically, what do you think about it? Many of them seem quite cheerful, but then there's the child psychologist warning about PTSD symptoms.
4/17
Someone talking about what's going on with the reactors. I noticed that his diagram shows both the mega-float (identified as such) and a large tank on the land, with two differently colored arrows slashing across into them. I don't think he explained them, though, because he was talking about something else.
4/18
A cruise liner, one of those multiple story buildings on a ship, pulled into Kyushu, the southern island, empty. Apparently the normal load of vacationers scheduled to be on it, mostly from China, all canceled. There's concern that the tourist trade is going to take a big hit this year, even in the parts of Japan that haven't had trouble with the quakes and tsunami.
This was an interview with a 62-year-old farmer. He's complaining that his house was destroyed by the earthquake, he still owes money for the loan, and now he can't sell mushrooms. He points out that his mushrooms are raised in a greenhouse, about 76 km southwest of Fukushima -- well outside the evacuation circles and the plots of measured radioactivity levels. However, he is still inside one of the prefectures that the government has embargoed. This led into a larger piece about farmers being upset with the embargoes.
Somewhere in the quake/tsunami area, near one of the shelters, they showed a group celebrating the cherry blossoms. They had drums, food, and in the background was a field of debris. A grizzled old 77-year-old told the cameras and his friends, "Step-by-step, we'll do it."
7 PM. More news about the robots. Apparently they couldn't go very far in number three, but the measured levels of were 28 milli sieverts, with a hotspot around 57. More extensive mapping in number one had a peak of 49, with 20s and tens. They said the average was about 28 to 29.
A little piece about the volunteer effort. They included shots of a map of northern Japan, with the edge spotted with dots. Apparently these are ongoing efforts. www.jpn-civil.net
I'm not sure of the area, but they were talking about over 300 condominium complexes being condemned. They showed video of one, where a large right hand section of the building had simply leaned away from the main building -- leaving corridors and so forth gaping on open air. One of the problems of course is that people want to go back in and grab stuff. I don't know -- if I looked at a building and saw that it was in two pieces, leaning away from each other, I might just decide that I didn't really need that stuff?
They showed one of the emergency centers closing. The 400 people who had been staying there have been relocated to hotels, houses, and so forth. They said there are still 136,299 in shelters.
Ouch. One of the ports had 37 big fishing boats. They're reporting 30 of them are destroyed -- mostly beached, several burned. They showed some of the video from the early 3/11 evening, with something burning on the seacoast -- that was the boats. They showed the burned wreckage. And the real bad part is that several of these are from the Hokkaido fishing fleet. Apparently they winter in this area, and hadn't yet gone north.
4/19
One town, not one of the bigger ones, estimates they have 790,000 tons of debris to clear.
They've recovered 168 bodies from inside the 20 km perimeter around Fukushima.
In one of the towns, they show 120 m x 60 m mountain of junk. They've got dump trucks pulling up to it and adding to it, backhoes working on the pile itself. This is the stuff that's been sorted and is ready for disposal, if they can figure out where to get rid of it. They laughingly show that there's also a large ship in the middle of town -- with a red bulbous prow that would normally be underwater, leaning a little bit sideways. My impression is that they aren't sure what to do with that.
There's a volunteer running around to the shelters with a truck full of washers and dryers. He shows he's got natural gas tanks and a generator to run things. Apparently he pulls into a parking lot, hands out numbers, and washes and dries all day -- for free. When he talked with the reporter, he said he watched the news and decided he could do this -- so he put together his truck, and he's out washing.
They're looking at the Sendai railroad yard. Lots of track bent and twisted. They're predicting it will be autumn, roughly, before they get straightened out.
There's that 10 year estimate to clean up again.
And in Tokyo, there seems to be a lot of refusal to buy. One of the companies shows that last year's little tiny fish -- white, about an inch long, commonly used a number of ways -- that has been frozen simply is not selling because it's from northeastern Japan. Apparently people are worried that it might be radioactive. Since it was harvested well before the earthquake, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but the vendors say even with reduced prices, no one is buying.
4/21 (sorry, skipped a day)
In one of the towns, they've got water back. The woman runs the water in the sink, then tells the reporter that mostly she's happy that she'll be able to take a bath again.
They've got a bus running in the town. It's going by fields of debris, and there aren't any passengers. The driver gets out at several spots and tells people that it's going to be running regularly, and it's free right now.
They've got part of a fish market going -- not too many fish, fishermen, or customers, but at least it's a start. They show that the dock is cracked. At this place, they've also got a robot -- American-made -- that they are using to explore the sea floor. It's like a miniature submarine, apparently with a camera. They're watching the screen and making notes about what they think is a submerged girder or something similar.
There's a little bit about an aquarium, with seals practicing their show. The young man who's putting them through their paces says they don't know what's happened. He doesn't know when they will open to the public again.
In this school, they've got three elementary or junior high schools using the same facility. They show students in classes set up in the auditorium. They're also running graduations, and trying to figure out who should move to other schools.
5:48 PM -- a short piece about a volunteer group in Yokohama, near Tokyo. They're making up boxes of vegetables, with a large message from a kid in the top of each box. They're also putting clothes and such in boxes, but they are taking each shirt, blouse, sweater, etc. and putting it in an individual clear plastic bag. On the outside of the bag, they put a wide piece of tape, and identify what's inside, which gender, and what size. The reporter explains that if you just stack things in a box, when people are getting it out, they get the other things dirty. So this group of volunteers is carefully wrapping pieces individually. They also add little messages to many of the individual bags. They also showed what amounted to personal hygiene kits -- soap, towels, toothbrush, etc. in again individual bags. The man who is leading the effort said that they are working closely with the shelters to make sure they are meeting real needs, and that the request to put it in individual bags came from the shelters.
In one of the areas, the plum trees are in bloom. People are out enjoying it, although it's apparently a mixture of evacuees and emergency shelter people, instead of the normal visitors.
There's some video of a group doing repair on railroad tracks. First they show the tracks where the bed has simply disappeared -- I'm not sure if the track has been bent way off of the bed, or the bed flooded out. Then they show them redoing the bed, setting in concrete ties, and using a really enormous jack to realign the track.
Apparently quite a few of the foreign students in the Tokyo area left for vacation and haven't come back. One of the Japanese language schools reports that of 400 scheduled students, they only have about 200.
There's a child psychologist visiting the shelters. He says he is seeing evidence of PTSD in a lot of the children. There are elementary school fourth grade and fifth grade kids that he talks to, and talks to their parents. He says they're going to need help. At one of the shelters, he invites all the children to join him. He takes them in a side room, and has them make balloon animals. He also gets out a trumpet, and they have a session of trying to blow the trumpet.
They also showed him talking with the teachers at one of the schools about signs to watch. He had three main signs, but they went too fast for me to catch. One of the teachers commented that she never expected to have to watch elementary school kids for this kind of thing.
(A little google search suggested re-experiencing the event, avoiding reminders of the trauma, and increased anxiety or emotional reactions, but I'm not sure if that was his three or not.)
I think this was training, not the real thing. Something I had never thought about -- they showed how a hospital surgery team is trained to react to earthquake. In the middle of surgery. They pushed the lights and equipment away, covered the patient. One of the nurses knelt down at the head of the patient, and grabbed his head with her hands, then held on. Basically locked his head down.
They also showed kids in an elementary school doing quake training. Either clear the walls and form a big pile, or if you're in an area with desks or tables, get underneath and hold on. It reminded me of the old "duck and cover" training (yes, I'm that old.)
Someone is estimating 20,000,000 tons of trash to be taken care of. They showed a company that does recycle board -- the chippers, pile of timber and cut trees, and a huge pile of chips, along with the machinery grinding out boards. Basically particle boards. The man who runs the company says they can only handle so much, though. He also shakes his head about separating out what they can use and the other stuff.
There's another little piece about the flags. Apparently a red flag means the building or whatever is condemned, don't mess with it. A yellow flag means you can reclaim stuff. And a green flag means it's OK. They talked with a man who said right now, most of the flags they are putting up are yellow flags.
22:37 magnitude 6 quake? Chiba, close to Tokyo, has a five. Fours and threes into Tokyo. Lots of talk about this one being relatively long?
4/22
There's a lot of talk about the new stricter evacuation rules. If I understand correctly, the government is trying to limit people wandering through the 20 kilometer area. So each family or company is supposed only have one person go in, once a day, for a short period of time. They're showing a man with his white suit, filter mask, and so forth rapidly trying to pick up things in his house. He's looking at a list on his iPhone! They also showed somebody trying to collect stuff from a company. There's also a video that's been shown a couple of times of the Prime Minister visiting one of the shelters and having a man yell at him. He listens, says he's sorry, bows.
In one of the areas just outside the evacuation area, they've got four schools that have joined together in a single facility. The teachers talk about possibly having to move again, and how do you prepare the students for that?
Hah! This morning, one of the shows had a short piece about your personal radiation monitors. There's the 29,900 unit (about $300) that shows numeric measures in a digital readout. Clips in your pocket, something like a wide flat pen. With a legend in English "This side towards body" which makes me suspect it comes from somewhere else. Or the card type, apparently from France, that has a little chip with a color dot, and a chart of various colors. I'll bet demand in the Tokyo area is still outrunning supply, though.
Incidentally, that show also had background numbers for the current period in Tokyo -- something like 19 microsevierts for the period from 3/14 to now. And foods, water, milk added another 97 or so. Which adds up to 116 -- somewhat less than you get doing the Tokyo-New York airplane flight, according to their chart.
It's going to be interesting to see how the children who have been through this grow up. I mean, when your home, family, relatives, friends disappear and shift so dramatically, what do you think about it? Many of them seem quite cheerful, but then there's the child psychologist warning about PTSD symptoms.
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Date: 2011-04-22 08:35 pm (UTC)I remember reading "The Big Wave" as a kid. It really stuck with me for years. It was the first thing I thought of on 3/11 - what it would be like to lose your home and everyone you know. Must be really terrifying for those kids. How does adoption work for the orphaned children?