Archive for March, 2011

World’s Deepest Breakwater Failed to Stop Tsunami

Several months ago, an award ceremony was held in the town of Kamaishi in Iwate prefecture. An official from the Guiness Book of World Records had come to proclaim that the Kamaishi Tsunami Protection Breakwater (63-meters deep) the title of world’s deepest breakwater. The event was described in a blog post:

The 1,960 m (6,430 ft 5 in) long breakwater was constructed at the mouth of Kamaishi bay to prevent from the threats of tsunami disaster from Pacific sea side. It reduces the bay-mouth opening to decrease tsunami run-up height as well as wind waves and swells. The construction work started in 1978 and it took amazing 31 years until it finally completed in March 2009.

To celebrate the much anticipated completion as well as the Guinness World Records achievement, Kamaishi city held the ceremony on the sightseeing boat, Hamayuri. I was honoured to be invited to present the certificate to the city mayor.

It was moving to hear from the people involved how much hard work had been spent for the construction. The citizens of Kamaishi are proud of their breakwater which protects their lives. It surely is an incredible world record!

Unfortunately, the record-breaking breakwater proved to be incapable of stopping the massive tsunami that hit the town on Friday:

…waves swelled over the barrier, engulfing buildings and cars and smashing everything in its path to smithereens in a matter of minutes.

The images from Japan’s Pacific coastline have been a scary reminder of nature’s power. Kamaishi thought it had built just the thing to keep the forces of nature at bay.

The concrete breakwater, nearly 207 feet deep, was designed to blunt an incoming tsunami. Its construction marked the culmination of decades of research on wave dynamics and dissipation. It stretches 6,430 feet and was completed in March 2009 after more than three decades of construction.

Videos of the tsunami destroying Kamaishi:

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has written an article that is extremely critical of Japan’s use of sea walls:

The risks of dependence on sea walls is most evident in the crisis at the Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants, both situated along the coast close to the earthquake zone. The tsunami that followed the quake washed over walls that were supposed to protect the plants.

Peter Yanev, one of the world’s best-known consultants on designing nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes, pointed out that the plants’ diesel generators were situated in a low spot on the assumption that the walls were high enough. That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.

Critics have long argued that the construction of sea walls is a hubristic effort to control nature as well as the kind of wasteful public works project that successive Japanese governments used to reward politically connected companies. Supporters have said the sea walls increased the odds of survival in a quake-prone country.

In Kamaishi, 14-foot waves surmounted the sea wall — the world’s largest, erected a few years ago in the city’s harbor at a length of 1.2 miles and a cost of $1.5 billion — and eventually submerged the city center.

“This is going to force us to rethink our strategy,” said Yoshiaki Kawata, a specialist on disaster management at Kansai University in Osaka and the director of a disaster prevention center in Kobe. “This kind of hardware just isn’t effective.”

Onishi is infamous for skewed and misleading articles he penned back when he served as the main Tokyo correspondent for the paper, so I’m not sure what to make of his article. It does seem obvious that sea walls failed to protect several towns from Friday’s tsunami, but is it because the whole concept of sea walls is flawed, or because they were not built to stop waves from a magnitude 9.0 earthquake?

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The Destruction of Kesennuma, Japan’s Shark Fin Town

About a month ago, The Guardian published a sensational piece about Japan’s “messy, blood-spattered” shark fin trade. The report focused on the city of Kesennuma, where most of Japan’s shark fin industry was centered. The industry was described as carrying out “genocide” against shark species.

Kesennuma is back in the news now. It was among the cities that suffered the worst damage from Friday’s tsunami. Most of the town has been reduced to ruins, and capsized and damaged fishing boats litter the ground among the debris of buildings:

Black smoke belched from fires that continued to spread even after daybreak in this city on the Sanriku Coast with a population of 75,700.

All but the platform of Minami-Kesennuma Station on the JR Kesennuma Line was swept away by tsunami as if it had never existed.

Also hit by tsunami, the city’s central community center near the station was flooded to the second-floor ceiling, forcing people evacuated there to stay overnight on the third floor, community center officials said.

Many wrecked cars and trucks lay amidst heaps of rubble, while broken houses were swept down the Okawa river along the JR line. The water continued to ebb and flow with waves from the sea.

Wood and other debris blanketed the street leading to the city’s fish market, making it impassable at a point near the railway station. A medium-size fishing boat and clumps of dead fish also had washed up there, covered with mud.

The terrifying tsunami strike has been caught on video by someone on top of what appears to be an embankment:

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Warning: Do Not Trust Death Reports on Google Person Finder

If you are using Google’s Person Finder App to search for information about people who were in Japan during the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, please be warned: the site has fallen victim to dozens of trolls. Legitimate inquiries by family members are being met with untruthful death notice responses from mean-spirited jerks.

Here are a few examples of comments reporting the deaths of several people:

Many of the death reports have been flagged as spam, but even when that happens, the app still shows a “someone has reported that this person is dead” notice on the search result screen. In several cases, the surviving person has already left a reply saying that they are indeed okay, but the app still reports them as dead.

A great tool that could help people has been trashed. Until methods are taken to crack down on trolling, it would not be a good idea to trust anything one reads on that site.

Update: I have been informed by a reliable source that Google is now aware of the problem and is cleaning things up. It looks like almost all of the death notices from the above screen capture are now gone and the victims are no longer “dead” in the system.

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Blackouts Delayed as Japanese Businesses Work to Conserve Electricity

Despite an announcement that there would be rolling blackouts in the Kanto region today, outages for the first and second time slots have been suspended. Tokyo Electric’s original blackout announcement may have scared people into making serious cutbacks in their use of electricity, so the power grid might be able to function without all of the planned blackouts.

The LA Times has reported on how businesses are working to reduce their energy use:

Even on a weekend, many of Japan’s corporate citizens took note. “Management’s orders” was the mantra at many spots that are customarily lit with cartoonish intensity: movie theaters, pachinko parlors, fast-food joints, karaoke bars that normally beckon would-be crooners from blocks away.

“Well, every little thing people can do to help is good,” said Yuichi Morita, a construction worker who nonetheless looked a bit crestfallen that the neon-emblazoned gaming arcade he frequents a few times a week had closed its doors early — and turned off the exterior lights, as if on cue, just as he arrived.

Convenience stores, ubiquitous in the capital, jumped on the turn-it-off bandwagon. Two of the largest chains, 7-Eleven and Lawson, began using minimal outside lighting, with only a single illuminated sign so customers would know they were open.

With many Japanese vowing to pull together in this time of adversity, voluntary power conservation suddenly became a way of showing solidarity with victims of the harrowing quake.

“I told my father,” recounted a Twitter narrative from a poster calling herself Ms. Yokoyama. “He didn’t say a thing; stood up, walked around the house and pulled out power plugs of appliances we weren’t using.

“Normally, he doesn’t care a thing about energy conservation, and leaves TVs and lights on even when he’s not using them,” she continued. “His silent action touched my heart.”

Another Twitter user in quake-hit Iwake prefecture responded with delight when the power was restored, crediting others’ forbearance. “Here comes the light!!” said a poster named Min. “Thank you for everyone who cooperated to save on electricity!!”

At the moment, many of the major train lines in the Kanto region are not functioning, so the lack of electricity use may simply be due to the fact that many businesses are shut down or operating with skeleton crews for the day. Whether or not blackouts will be needed remains to be seen, but it would be safe to assume that there will at least be some blackouts in the near future.

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Google’s Helpful 2011 Japanese Earthquake Site

Mega props to Google for setting up an awesome 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami crisis response site:

The multi-lingual site includes news headlines, charity donation information, transportation and electricity status information, and person-finder links. Google has really done an excellent job of setting up a one stop information page!

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Paul Watson: Tsunami That Killed Hundreds of Japanese Was Divine Punishment

Paul Watson, leader of Sea Shepherd, can now be counted among those people who have posted disgusting online messages attributing the Tohoku earthquake to divine punishment. Here is a little poem he wrote, celebrating the tsunami as the “fearful wrath” of the angry sea god Neptune, who “smote” the ocean floor:

Tsunami

Neptune’s voice rolled like thunder thru the sky
Angrily he smote the deep seabed floor
From the shore echoed mankind’s mournful cry
……The sea rose up and struck fast for the shore

From out of the East with the rising sun
The seas fearful wrath burst upon the land
With little time to prepare or to run
Against a power no human can stand

Does Watson literally believe in sea gods? Probably not, but that doesn’t change the fact that his poem characterizes this disaster as mother nature’s revenge against Japan.

[hat tip to Kujirakira]

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