Japan Quake/Tsunami

[Inazuma]

The toll on the rescue workers

http://www.japantoday.com/category/life ... -hit-areas

Lots of respect for those rescue workers. It must have been extremely stressful for them to dig through debris and discover dead bodies like that. I don't know if I would have been able to handle doing such a job.

I still can't believe this whole thing even happened. It's unreal. 27k dead now? Man, that is so horrible.

[vash23n]

About how long do aftershocks generally occur? I was surprised to hear about this most recent one, but being from the Southeastern United States, I have had no experience with a real earthquake.

Not sure if we talked about this, but wasn't the big quake technically an aftershock of the quake in the 7s that came a week earlier - you hear of the quakes leading up to the big 9.1 as having been preshocks (foreshocks?), but I heard that's inaccurate and that things are described this way because it's easier for people to comprehend the biggest of a series of quakes as the main one. Phew... a run on sentence in there, but I think you get the idea! Anyhoo, I read this in a CNN article and in that same article they said scientists expect aftershocks from this quake to continue for a year at least. I also heard there has been an unbelievable amount of aftershocks since the big quake (some of them not strong enough to be felt). The area still seems to be very volatile.

[Breetai]

27k dead now? Man, that is so horrible.

Dead or missing (which is very possibly dead). Extremely horrible. The only good thing is that Japan's building code is very good, compared to countries like Indonesia, Peru, China, Haiti, etc. Earthquakes of much less intensity (aside the SE Asia one that included much if Indonesia) took a lot more lives in those places. Actually, it wasn't even the huge quake that took lives. That is how awesomely prepared Japan is. It was the tsunami. Again, even with that, there were many lives saved. There were very large tsunami barriers already in place, plus a warning system. The warning system gave around 8-15 minutes of warning in most places, plus the barriers gave even a few more minutes. Many people were able to make it up to higher ground. It was mainly the elderly and feeble that were killed, from what I read. In most other countries, since both building codes are not so high and tsunami warning systems are lacking, the death toll would have been insane.

The current death toll is a bit over 13,000 people. Very sad, but it could have been much worse.