Apologies for the OT...

As I am sure many of you know, the recent quake in Japan is devastating. Using devastating is an understatement. The Sendai quake was listed as an 8.9 magnitude quake and lasted several minutes. Yes, minutes. It was 80 miles off of the coast of Japan. Aftershocks are in the very high 6 to low 7 magnitude range. Not that rankings matter, but this was one of the biggest ever since records have been kept. I have been in touch with my relatives and friends over there, and it is very bad. My friends, who run an English pre-school in Narita (one of two Tokyo airports), said that at night they are awakened about every half-hour from the aftershocks.

Expect to hear of much increased numbers of dead in the coming days. There are complete towns of missing people because of not just the quake, but the tsunami estimated at about 30 feet high when hitting shore. It is estimated that the island (Honshu) has been shifted about eight feet and as much as 12 feet in places, with subsidence (lowering of land) which is the reason some of the water is pooling and not returning to the sea. The Earth's axis was shifted about four inches. The tsunami went inland as far as six miles in some places. Six miles.

Understand that the Richter Scale is logarithmic, so each whole number represents a ten-fold increase in magnitude. For comparison - The January 1995 Kobe quake (Hanshin quake) was 6.8 magnitude and lasted about 20 seconds. 14,000 people died from that quake. The Northridge quake (January 1994, southern California) was 6.7 magnitude, lasted about 45 seconds, and 33 died. The Sendai aftershocks are in the same range as the Kobe and Northridge quake magnitudes.

However, the quake and tsunami damage is somewhat done, and now the power plants (nuclear) are a major concern. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company TEPCO runs these facilities and their web site is currently "unavailable" at this time, or is running "slow" because, I imagine, people are trying to find out what is going on. The distance of the Fukushima Dai-ichi and Dai-ni (Unit One and Unit Two, Ichi=One, Ni=Two) is quite a distance from the epicenter, but this was a very large quake. Dai-Ichi has six reactors and Dai-ni has four.

I am sure many of you have read about the "meltdown" and so on. Although nothing has been actually confirmed at this time, using seawater to cool the core is usually a last ditch effort when it comes to dealing with such things. I spoke with my brother, who is a Cal grad in Nuclear Engineering (no BS) and serves in the Navy, about this and that was his thought. Hopefully, because these units were in part designed and built by General Electric, the confinement vessel is appropriately built. However, the quake may have undermined it.

As a person of half-Japanese heritage, I have strong feelings about this situation. The Japanese are a proud and resilient people. They will recover from this without complaint. This, I know.

Anyway, again, my apologies for the OT.