One problem with satellite photos is you don't know what has happened since taken. One may legitimately posit an apartment complex that looks empty in the image may now be filled to capacity and teeming with life. A recent expose by a journalist on the ground demolishes those theories.
What is most impressive about the apartment complex shown is how they built the entire place without adding any roads yet. Hopefully they'll get around to it. Zoom out and look around (both north and east) and you can see the scale of this new city. Like the video above almost all of this new Chenggong appears unused.
The tragic stories coming from Japan keep piling up and the death toll climbs every day as the Japanese try to dig themselves out of the rubble. The humanitarian challenge of caring for a couple hundred thousand homeless is straining even the organized Japanese.
Amongst the despair and rubble there are amazing stories of bravery and determination emerging.
Here is one of them. Hideaki Akaiwa escaped the earthquake and tsunami, but after being unable to find his wife, scrounged up some SCUBA gear and went back into the waters to find his wife! He succeeded and later pulled the same technique to find his mother. A somewhat embellished but great read of the story goes something like this (from Badassoftheweek 03/18/11)
Regardless of how he came across this equipment (borrowing, stealing, buying, beating up a Yakuza SCUBA diving demolitions expert, etc.) Hideaki threw on his underwater survival gear, rushed into the goddamned tsunami, and dove beneath the rushing waves, determined to rescue his wife or die trying. I'm not exactly sure whether or not the dude even knew how to operate SCUBA equipment, but according to one version of his story he met his wife while he was surfing (which is awesome, by the way), so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to say that he already had a little experience SCUBA diving under a more controlled situation. Of course, even if this dude didn't know how to work the gear I'm certain that wouldn't have stopped him either – Hideaki wasn't going to let a pair of soul-crushing natural disasters deter him from doing awesome shit and saving his family. He dove down into the water, completely submerged in the freezing cold, pitch black rushing current on all sides, and started swimming through the underwater ruins of his former hometown.
Surrounded by incredible hazards on all sides, ranging from obscene currents capable of dislodging houses from their moorings, sharp twisted metal that could easily have punctured his oxygen line (at best) or impaled him (at worst), and with giant fucking cars careening through the water like toys, he pressed on. Past broken glass, past destroyed houses, past downed power lines arcing with electrical current, through undertow that could have dragged him out to sea never to be heard from again, he searched.
Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.
Google has a service for people looking those lost or missing in Japan. The url is: http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=en
They currently have over 250 thousand records. One word of caution however, some cruel people are posting entries stating some people have died and these entries are entirely false so while I don't want to encourage false hope be cautious of such entries.
From metro.uk
One family were crushed when a message posted on the Google people finder by Lucas. A said that Brian Hickebottom had died in the disaster. However, it emerged that the information was wrong, and he had found refuge in the school where he and his wife work, much to his relatives' relief . . . Responding to a post about US marine Justan Browning, which said he had died when a building collapsed, someone going by the name Canadian Friend wrote: 'I have seen several false reports that people are deceased. It is disgusting. Do not give up hope. Call your government to verify the above report.'
Internet trolling pays off again. I think I've found some (semi real time) radiation data sites. My Japanese is limited to the auto translate function in Google Chrome but it appears there are some locations still publishing radiation data. I'm not quite certain of the units due to the translator but you can see peaks and valleys in the data and the peaks are not too much worse than the valleys. It also appears they liken 50,000 to a chest xray, or at least that's how Google Chrome is translating it....
Again the power of social media reveals itself. There is a multi part interview series here http://georneys.blogspot.com/2011/03/third-follow-up-interview-with-my-dad.html
of a retired Navy and civilian nuclear engineer which I highly recommend you listen to. He does an excellent job laying out the facts of what we know and don't know as time has progressed through this emergency.
I'm not going to comment/report/speculate on the current news of the moment regarding the nuclear situation in Japan as its changing so often and right now the news flow from Japan is sparse as it is night time over there. In a few hours we'll have another update on what is going on. If you listen to the interviews above you can get a sense of the unfolding situation and how Mr. Mervine predicted the fuel rod storage problem. Hopefully the 3 active plants will be successfully cooled down and the fuel rod storage situation in the 3 (#4,#5,#6) non active plants will be contained.
While trolling around the internet attempting to find hard data on what sort of radiation levels we are seeing in Japan I found this site where someone is graphing radiation levels in real time in Tokyo. http://park18.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html
The site is in Japanese but you can translate it using google translate or other services available on the web. While the graph shown does show an increase in radiation levels it is only ~4 times the background level which is very minimal. This is good news compared to the other reports coming out of Japan regarding the radiation leaking from the stricken nuclear plants. It is important to get factual data about what sort of radiation levels are being detected and where and unfortunately it has been hard to find so far.
If you can pass along any quantitative data I'd appreciate it.
The site fades in and out and I'm guessing it is due to massive traffic to the site. The photos are stunning. Here's a few samples:
While I have not heard anyone separate the damage between the two events it appears the tsunami did more damage. I was watching CNN a few minutes ago and the official body count is approximately 1,600 but they have just found another 2,000 bodies so I'm certain the toll will rise as the days progress.
Video:
Keeping up to date: There are some English based news sources in Japan
Nuclear power plant situation: This is an ongoing event and so separating the facts from rumor or speculation is a challenge. What we know right now is there have been explosions at Fukushima Daiichi plants #1 & #3. Before you panic it appears this was due to the venting of hydrogen from the inner core which mixed with oxygen and exploded. When the earthquake hit the nuclear power plants immediately shut down by dropping their control rods. The problems started when the backup generators failed due to the tsunami and could no longer run the pumps cooling the reactor cores. (Even after a shutdown there is a massive amount of residual heat which must be shunted away from the core) In an attempt to prevent the central core from breaching they vented gas to bring the pressure down and release heat which then released the hydrogen and it blew off the exterior structure.
So farit appears the main central core which actually holds the fissable material is still intact. Fortunately the prevailing winds are blowing any radioactive gas east offshore and into the ocean. Right now they are flooding #1 reactor with seawater and boric acid to cool the reactor.
I have simplified this description a bit but if you want the technical details I suggest you go to:
which has quite a bit of technical information and a continuing discussion of the ramifications.
I'm not making any predictions as to what happens but the central core appears to be still intact and considering what is has been through is actually pretty impressive. They still need to cool both cores and keep them from breaching. I'll be watching this closely over the next few days.
What is most impressive about the apartment complex shown is how they built the entire place without adding any roads yet. Hopefully they'll get around to it. Zoom out and look around (both north and east) and you can see the scale of this new city. Like the video above almost all of this new Chenggong appears unused.
