Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The Phone Goes off...

Mercy--I was just about to start writing this post about the several quakes we've had today... and my phone went off "whoop!whoop!whoop!" before I could start typing.  Nagano prefecture--nothing big this time, though.  Fourth quake today. The JMA shows it to have been a weak 5 on the Shindo scale.  I'm not sure why my phone went off--looking at the JMA map, the shock waves didn't come anywhere near this far east.  Somebody must have thought the waves would travel farther, and sent the warning over the cell phone system...

The first one was this morning--while I was on Skype with a friend.  Number one there says "In Fukushima prefecture earthquake beginning".  According to the Japan Quake Map, that one was a 6.2M at a depth of 13km--which must be why it was as strong here as it was.  Shook the house pretty good (of course, we're on the fourth floor, so we feel the swaying more than somebody on the first floor), but nothing fell over.  Interestingly, the quake map shows a 6M at around 2pm that I know I felt, but the phone didn't go off.   Hmmm...  Must be hard to predict how far shock waves will travel.

I'm up to 15 now (photo is already outdated as of this writing) on the quake history list (it only shows quakes that were big enough to trigger the warning system).  Everyone up in Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi must have phones full of warnings.  Watching the news with my husband last night, I jumped because I heard the phone go off... then realized it wasn't mine, it was footage from a refugee shelter in Fukushima shot just as a quake hit.  You could hear someone's phone going off in the video footage.  Children were crying in fright--I wanted to reach right through the TV and hold them 'til the shaking stopped.  Those school buildings must be sturdy.  They've been hit by goodness knows how many 5M, 6M, and even 7M aftershocks... yet still they stand.  One of these days I'll have the foresight to have the video camera out when my phone goes off.  But in the meantime-- go visit my brother-in-law Matt's place at Hellion Gallery.  He had just hung the last picture for his upcoming show yesterday when a 6.6M quake hit off the coast at 5:16pm.  He realized after a few seconds that he actually had his camera in his hand, and began shooting.  The show is being held in a bar--so all the wine glasses became quake-chimes.  (You can also see the Blaine Fontana piece that I like so much when he turns around--the long wood piece with bonsai on top.   He uses all recycled wood for his sculptures--really beautiful!  Blaine will be doing recycled wood sculptures for the upcoming TED conference scheduled for June in Portland--can't wait to see what he does for it!).
.

11 comments:

  1. La tecnologia siempre tendrĂ¡ fallos, al final nada es perfecto puesto que ningun hombre lo es y ellos son los que inventas estos aparatos.

    Saludos,

    Postes de madera

    ReplyDelete
  2. Have you read this story - the debris from the tsunami floating out into the Pacific -
    http://www.hawaii.edu/newsatuh/2011/04/tsunami-debris/

    dom

    ReplyDelete
  3. seriously, when are the quakes supposed to stop? For reals how long can they keep up? It just seems like it's never ending and i don't even live there

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you for posting this. We get maddeningly little on the news about the ongoing situation over there, now that the major initial 'Shock! Horror!' aspects are (hopefully) over. Even a Google News search turns up more financial stories than anything else. Not going to rant about media priorities, but it sure is frustrating!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm with Daz. I didn't realize how many there were until your post. I'd only really heard about two aftershocks, and those being only little sidenotes on the regular news.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Todo Pasa-- Claro, usted tiene razon:-) Aunque la tecnologia no es perfecta, es mejor que nada en absoluto. Muchas gracias por su comentario! Yokoso! (Bienvenido!)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dominic-- holy cow. Thanks for the link--I never thought about the debris from the tsunami! Of course there must be an incredible amount of junk in the ocean...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Sarah-- It feels like forever here, too. The quakes had kind of stopped last week, and now we're having a bunch again. With a quake this big, I guess it unsettles everything and causes quakes in other places than the main site. A couple yesterday originated in Nagano-- inland and west of here, nowhere near Sendai (and of course far from the subduction zone in the ocean).

    ReplyDelete
  9. Daz & Alice--I'll try to keep you all updated as best I can. I just assumed that everybody was overwhelmed with news and I would just be repeating stuff you'd already heard (not being much of the journalist-type myself). Went to a baseball moms' meeting this morning, and no sooner had we all sat down than all of our phones went off... Fukushima again--worrisome. I can't help but think that all these continuing shocks must be bad for the reactors.

    ReplyDelete
  10. According to Iain Stewart, a geologist, who did the most down-to-earth science-driven, and least spectacle-driven, documentary I've seen on this so far, a major quake will release the pressure in its immediate area, but not all of the pressure is released into the air/water. Some, or even much, of it will be transferred into the neighbouring rocks, putting strain on other parts of the fault-system.

    Basically, you get a domino effect. And there's no reason why the later quakes should be weaker, either. The neighbouring region could take just as much, or even more, pressure to make it finally buckle. The size of the straw being passed from camel to camel bears no relation to the size of the camels.

    On a lighter note, here's the first part of a great Iain Stewart TV series. (The rest'll be on YT somewhere, I 'spect.)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thinking of a whole generation conditioned to jump at that cell phone alarm...what an awful "new normal." (Albeit a valuable tool.)

    --Diane G.

    ReplyDelete