picture of the day

One week later

17 Comments

A resident cycles past debris in Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, on Friday, one week after the area was devastated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.

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17 Comments
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It is incredible to think that water can do that much damage.

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at smartacus, I thought the same. But at 500 km an hour (or so I heard) Water becomes like a wall of concrete.

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It is incredible to think that water can do that much damage over a 300k stretch of coastline

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The water can help give and help build lives and help take and destroy lives. It is amazing what damage has been done. If I didn't know any better, I would swear I was looking at a picture of some scrap yard.

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What blows my mind is that it wiped it all away in a matter of seconds yet it will take years and years to ever rebuild all of that. For it to look normal again.

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I heard it was 800 kph. Even that one secluded cove area which had 20-foot high, three-feet thick anti-tsunami concrete walls was completed wiped out and the walls themselves smashed to bits.

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I was there in Yamada earlier this week with my wife to check on her family and deliver a car full of food and goods. Luckily her immediate family are all fine and their house was a meter or two high enough to be untouched. Most of the town was built up on the low lying flats with almost nothing but trees on the higher ground. What I wonder is, how will people rebuild? Stubbornly rebuild on the same ground, or leave that to agriculture and move higher up?

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If they rebuild on the hillsides there may be a danger of soil instability in floods or typhoons. With respect to the speed of the tsunami, it was reported as travelling at 300kmh but that's the compression wave itself - once it reached land, the water wouldn't have travelled nearly so fast, but as all the videos show, it was fast enough to outrun people.

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once it reached land, the water wouldn't have travelled nearly so fast, but as all the videos show, it was fast enough to outrun people.

That's right. According to Japanese TV it would have been able 37kmph on land. About the speed of an Olympic sprinter.

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It is so unfair!! There is a movement in Cairn , far North Queensland, to receive thousands of earthquake, tsunami victims from Japan.

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Volatility of a market, society and human life can be changed in a second, ... Japan has more power to rebuild its devastated prefectures ...

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It is so unfair!! There is a movement in Cairn , far North Queensland, to receive thousands of earthquake, tsunami victims from Japan.

Natural forces are neither "fair" nor "unfair". They just ARE. There was no vindictiveness in the earthquake and tsunami, no malice, no compassion, no emotion what-so-ever. For as long as the Earth supports human life, humans will have to deal with these events as a normal part of their environment.

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o god are you sleeping?

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I'm just looking at all the snow piled up on top of the ruins and hoping that the recovery will go better than the last week. I'm just gutted looking at such devastation.

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"o god are you sleeping?"

According to Ishihara and some others, God did all this.

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Terrible. I still haven't really grasped the scope of this. We see images like this a lot and the Google Earth sat images showing the destruction, but it's still not really fathomable yet to me just how much destruction there is.

Was never surprised Ishihara tool would make that statement. Was overly hoping the Emperor would have said: "...and on my authority as a descendant of Amaterasu Ookami, Gov. Ishihara and his cronies are morons." But knew it was a silly dream.

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Like the rest of you this is hard to accept as being life in those parts of Japan. Naturally one has to wonder if the reactors can be corrected & can these parts of Japan get back to normal-----honestly it boggles the mind for on news reports we can see it is snowing again.

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