telophase | (no subject)

That's a great link.

Yes! It makes me wish we had more of a disaster-preparedness mentality here. I'm not in an area that gets quakes or hurricanes, but we get tornadoes, and whenever there's a tornado warning and the sirens go off, at work we're supposed to herd the students down to the basement, which is a campus shelter area, and there's always a few who just leave the library to walk across campus to their rooms. HELLO?!

This is my favorite line from that post: See, the thing that people don’t realize is that Honshu is massive. It is larger than Great Britain. (A country which does not typically refer to itself as a “tiny island nation.”)

Hee! Yes!

Today I ran into a question on AskMeFi from someone in LA, citing Chernobyl, worried about their chances of radiation because of LA's proximity to Japan. *twitch* (Most sensible answer: "Ukraine is 6000 miles from Los Angeles. Tokyo is 5500 miles from Los Angeles. You'll be OK.")

Just because it's only five inches on the MAP...*head in hands*

They cited the tsunami warnings on the West Coast for the "proximity" thing ... ENORMOUS MASSIVE GIGANTOQUAKE and perfectly normal global wind patterns are entirely different scales, people!

Janni's father called to make sure that we're safe from the earthquake and tsunami.

Here in Arizona.

---L.

Oh, dear! XD

One thing that has struck me about footage of the tsunami rushing into cities and towns is that those cities and towns do not look like they have just been shaken by a 9.0 earthquake for two minutes. All the buildings were still standing.

That is what we call extraordinary engineering.

---L.

Japan is one of the places that I'd like to be, if I absolutely had to be there during an earthquake.

In a post-1981 building, as I think that was when the current regs came into effect. :D

Post-1995 you want -- the regulations were re-redone after the Kobe quake. Along with EVERYTHING getting retrofitted and redundantized.

---L.

Ah, even better!

Thanks! Fantastic article.

And such a breath of fresh air, as today I've already run into questions on AskMeFi from people in Yokohama, Hawaii, and Los Angeles worrying about how much radiation they're going to get, and if they should get farther away. (Most sensible answer "Ukraine is 6000 miles from Los Angeles. Tokyo is 5500 miles from Los Angeles. You'll be OK.")

Some folks can only think in ego-centric terms, even if it defies logic.

There's also a bunch of OMG NUUUUUUUUKES!!!!! happening. I've seen people freaking out elsewhere over it, despite many, many reassurances from others who actually work in the industry and know exactly what the failsafes are on the Japanese reactors and what the consequences are if they all fail. (People are still freaked out over Three Mile Island, and grand total radiation released there: 0.)

Scary Nuclear Meltdowns!!

The only time you'd see a catastrophe at the level the public envisions is if the system was neglected for 20 yrs, procedures weren't followed in response to potential issues, and the guy at the control panel fell asleep and faceplanted a few important buttons.

Yay for engineers who put lots of redundancy and emergency response systems in place to take care of the job given them.

Edited 2011-03-14 19:29 (UTC)

Not to mention willfully overriding safety features, which was key at Chernobyl!

People get very weird about radiation in all sorts of ways.

True story: when I worked for a nuclear pharmaceutical manufacturer and we had a consulting firm in to build us new software, nothing would do for the consultants but that I write the code to calculate radioactive decay. Which is just one simple line, but they didn't want to touch it.

Oh, good lord.

I like one of the commenter's points:

"One of the differences you see here is that the Japanese culture produced a communal response to a disaster. Everyone had a role and carried out that role. That role was determined by the government (working under the advice of specialists) and people got in line to do their jobs. Here people would have a) complained that the government has no right to tell them what to do in a catastrophe, b) insisted that they could cowboy it up and do it on their own, and c) complained when the government didn’t come in and save them any way."

Exactly!