Year end update

Recently my schedule has changed somewhat and I haven't been able to keep up with as much of the Japanese news as I would like to, but here is a little info that I heard at the end of the year.

If I understood correctly, I believe that the last refugee shelter was closed on December 28th. Never the less, 350,000 people are living in temporary shelters. A lot of these communities are made up of residents from many different areas, so they are being encouraged to make bonds with their new neighbors.

After the quake many volunteers came to the affected areas to help the locals rebuild. Since then the number of volunteers has dropped quite a bit, but there are still people coming to help those in need. I just saw some footage of people helping a farmer pick plastic, glass and other bits of debris from his crop land.

The number of self defence force personnel being deployed has been reduced as well. This has worried some communities that have lost of lot of manpower for labor and police forces.

Work continues to clean up the Fukushima nuclear reactors. After the accident, there was talk of a "cold shutdown" planned to take place within the first nine months. That may have been achieved already, but at that time no one knew how badly the reactor cores had melted down. Last news I heard was for a 30 to 40 year plan to clean up the reactor cores. But this too is probably only a guess since it is not known yet how the core material will be disposed of. Not only that, the technology to do this does not even exist and needs to be developed. The following is a newspaper diagram explaining a proposed method of extracting the core material...

The most recent side effect of this disaster regards construction companies who unknowingly used concrete making ingredients which had been polluted with radiation. This has caused some streets and buildings to have been constructed with radioactive materials. Last I heard, this investigation is still under way, but residents in some of these places have been relocated. It sounds like last May there was a proposal for a government regulation on the radiation levels in construction materials, but somehow this regulation was never created.

There was one other unexpected occurrence related to the nuclear disaster. Because of the fear of radiation, many people started carrying around their own radiation detectors. There were actually a few incidents of people finding radioactive hot spots that were totally unrelated to the Fukushima disaster.

That's all I can think of to report on for this year. Happy New Year and lets hope for the best as Japan continues to rebuild in 2012.

Fukushima and Chernobyl Comparison

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima has been called the second worst nuclear disaster following Chernobyl. For the amounts of radiation released, the Fukushima disaster was quite serious, but in terms of radioactive material spread, Chernobyl was much worse. The following is a chart comparing the spread of radioactive cesium 137. It shows that the levels released from the Fukushima reactor were much less.

Tsunami pictures from the Fukushima Reactor

Here are a few images of the Fukushima nuclear reactor during the tsunami.

Animal rescue in the nuclear evacuation area

Soon after the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, the evacuation order was given for people living close to the reactor. Most residents didn't have time to prepare for this resulting in many abandoned pets and farm animals. All of these towns became virtual ghost towns except for all of these animals running free. There was actually footage of livestock running free through residential neighborhoods. Unfortunately there were many pets that died of neglect, but once some of these areas became safe for people to enter for short periods of time, humane society groups initiated missions to retrieve as many pets as possible.

Aquarium Sea Creature Refugees

In addition to the many thousands of people who had to take refuge after the earthquake and tsunami, sea creatures from the Aquamairne Fukushima Aquarium had to be relocated to other aquariums throughout Japan.

The aquarium in Fukushima was flooded by the tsunami and many of the fish died, but the larger animals were able to survive. Since conditions at the aquarium were not suitable to keep it in operation these animals had to take refuge at locations that could accommodate them. A seal from there was relocated to the aquarium next to where we live.

Convenience Stores

To the people of Japan, the convenience store is not just a place to get daily necessities at any time. They also are centers for mail and shipping, have bank ATMs, and all kinds of bills and purchasing can be paid for in cash from any local neighborhood location. So the Japanese convenience store is a hub of a lot of community activity. In the most heavily damaged areas of Japan, many convenience store companies did their best to continue providing service to their customers. In places, they even conducted business without even having a building...
Some places used mobile trucks...

Eventually temporary structures were erected to house the new store....

Chiba Prefecture

Here's some more old news regarding the effect of the earthquake in Chiba Prefecture. One of the scariest incidents was the fuel depot that caught on fire. A friend of mine lives in Chiba in the next city over from where my wife and I lived when I first moved here. She said she was able to see the smoke clouds from her home. The following picture is of the fuel depot after it cooled down and was safe enough for people to get close to it...

A lot of the populated area of Chiba, including Tokyo Disney Land, has been built up on wetlands. To build up the land, the ground was made more stable by injecting sand into its lower layers. Since the area was still very close to the water table, this building up process was disturbed by the earthquake and cause an unusual phenomenon where the ground itself took on the properties of water. In a few places, you could see sidewalks or rows of hedges next to the street bobbing up and down as if it were a boat floating on water.

Because of the shifting of the land, the foundations of many houses became tipped to one side or another. Now a lot of homeowners are having to go trough the trouble of resetting their house on a level foundation. The property values dropped dramatically as well, causing a lot of worries for people invested in a home there.

Speaking of Tokyo Disney, a friend of a friend was there when the earthquake happened. Of course all of the rides stopped immediately. The people that were on the rides had to take the little service routes to get out of the attractions. For fear of further disaster, Disney customers were not allowed to leave the premises. In addition to that, since the stability of the buildings was uncertain, the people had to stay outdoors until about 3:00am the next morning when they were allowed to leave. It has taken Disney several months, but they finally reopened.

Health problems after the earthquake/tsunami disaster

I'm just doing a little catching up with this old news story. It goes back to right after the big earthquake and tsunami occurred. In addition to the obvious injury and loss of life, there were many other health problems that accompanied the survivors in the following days and weeks.

The first was a large outbreak of colds and flu among the people living in the refugee shelters. Most of these locations were school gymnasiums or other auditoriums where there were many people living very close together without proper medical supplies or sanitation. To make the matters worse, most of the damaged area was still in the winter season. In addition to the physical difficulties, the close quarters and lack of privacy caused a certain amount of mental stress as well.

When the evacuees had to go to the shelters, it was of course on short notice and people were not able to take their medications with them. This lead to a number of deaths especially in old people from hypertension and diabetes complications. After the quake, there was a breakdown of transportation between medical supply distributors and the hospitals if they still existed. And from there, the doctors had a hard time finding where their patients were.

Many of the people who's homes were still standing had no water, electricity, natural gas or garbage collection. Many people were using gas powered electric generators and unwittingly had the machines running in the houses which caused some carbon monoxide complications.

After the water had receded, a muddy sludge was left covering the ground. As this sludge dried, it turned into a fine black dust which caused respiratory problems for the people living and working there.

In the following months after the earthquake, refugees were relocated outside of their original communities. There were a few sad incidents of elderly people passing away because they had no family or known neighbors nearby to check on their daily safety.
Note: Since this last news story originally came out, a system of signal devices were created for elderly people to call for help in an emergency.

Cardboard Toilets and More

The large scale disaster that happened on March 11th caused many shortages and people had to rely on limited resources for their daily needs. On one talk show instructions were given on how to create a toilet out of cardboard, tape and plastic bags. Basically, one box was used as the body of the toilet while a seat, lid and weight supporting bracing was attached to it. The plastic garbage bag was place into it to retain the waste products and then removed when necessary. Of course they recommended using non transparent black garbage bags for obvious reasons.

In the months that passed after the quake, designers developed makeshift "rooms" out of cardboard. Basically these are a form of partitioning that could be set up in auditoriums, gymnasiums, etc to create private spaces for refugees to live in.