>Tsunami Victim: Dog Rescued After 3 Weeks Adrift [VIDEO]

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Check out this little tsunami victim, a dog that somehow stayed alive on a floating pile of rubble with a roof on top for three weeks before the Japanese Coast Guard rescued him.

If a dog can stay alive under these conditions, couldn’t a human? That’s an important question, because there are still 18,000 tsunami and earthquake victims missing in Japan, with little hope for their survival.

How did this dog stay alive? While dogs and humans can survive for three weeks without food, they can’t go longer than a couple of days without water. Floating in the ocean off the coast of Japan, the dog was surrounded by salt water, but like a human in the same situation, that wouldn’t have kept him alive — according to the Department of Energy’s Ask a Scientist website:

Humans can’t drink salt water because the kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking salt water, you have to urinate more water than you drank, so you die of dehydration.

It must have been a rainy three weeks aboard this ragtag vessel, where small collected pools of fresh water must have kept the dog alive.

It’s probably too late for more survivors to be found, but it’s not too late for you to help earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. Here’s how.

>U.S. Sounds Alarm on Radiation(Video)

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TOKYO—Fear about radiation dangers posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis spiked as the U.S. instructed its troops and citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the crippled reactors—establishing a “no-go” zone far wider than the buffer recommended by the Japanese government itself. And in a vivid sign that Japan’s leadership is trying to move decisively to take control of the deepening crisis, the nation’s military force dispatched two helicopters Thursday morning local time to dump water over the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power complex in hopes of taming its dangerously overheating nuclear facilities. The effort targeted a pool of spent nuclear fuel at reactor No. 3. Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said the water would help cool the spent fuel, lessening the risk of a catastrophic fire, if the water hit its target.

Mr. Kitazawa also said 11 water-cannon trucks were to be deployed at the plant Thursday afternoon in a further effort to cool the overheating waste.

Japan’s nuclear regulator also announced that it was working to connect outside power cables to two of the units at the stricken plant, in hopes of restarting their cooling pumps. They hoped to have the cables available by Thursday afternoon.

Restarting the pumps would mark a major advance in the effort to prevent the nuclear disaster from worsening.

Japan’s widening government involvement came as international skepticism built up. Late Wednesday, the U.S. State Department authorized the voluntary evacuation of dependents of U.S.-government personnel based in northeast Japan. The State Department also added that U.S. citizens in Japan consider departing, and reiterated its caution that citizens defer travel to the country at this time.

Earlier in the day, the top U.S. nuclear regulator, Gregory Jaczko, called radiation levels at one of the plant’s units “extremely high,” adding that, “for a comparable situation in the United States we would recommend an evacuation for a much larger radius than is currently being provided in Japan.”

Previously the U.S. had agreed with Japanese officials that a 12-mile evacuation zone was adequate. The change came after the NRC ran computer-modeling exercises using “the best available information we have” about the damaged reactors along with accumulated knowledge about how systems inside nuclear plants perform under “severe accident conditions,” a spokesman with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Asked why the U.S. set a broader “no-go” zone than did Japan, government spokesmen Yukio Edano said in a press conference that it was understandable to make a more “conservative decision” when trying to ensure the safety of citizens abroad, in a country where it doesn’t exert direct control. He reiterated that Japan’s government feels it is taking appropriate measures.

Also on Wednesday, the U.K. government advised its citizens in the city of Tokyo, a full 150 miles from the nuclear site, to “consider leaving the area” due to increasing infrastructure problems. The European Union’s energy chief, Guenther Oettinger, also declared the Fukushima Daiichi site “effectively out of control.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Oettinger later said the commissioner’s remarks reflected his own personal views, and weren’t based on privileged information.

Stock markets staged large swings, reflecting the depth of anxiety world-wide. “Every investment decision is made through the prism of what is going on in Japan,” said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 2% lower at 11613. Thursday morning, Tokyo shares slid 2.1%.

Late Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was deploying additional radiation monitors out of “an abundance of caution.” The EPA already monitors the air for radiation via a national network of approximately 140 stationary and mobile devices. The agency said it sent additional monitors to Alaska and plans to send some to Hawaii.

Officials with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department say they don’t expect harmful radiation levels to reach the U.S.

As part of the government effort to take on a larger role in the crisis management, on Wednesday plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, said 20 government officials had moved into the company’s offices as part of a joint crisis headquarters.

The government’s use of helicopters to dump water on the site was ordered by Economics Minister Banri Kaieda. “The minister considered the situation to be dangerous and judged there was an imminent necessity to issue the order,” said a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which is part of Mr. Kaieda’s purview. “After learning that Tepco was not injecting cooling water, he judged it to be very dangerous.”

Two helicopters made two trips each, scooping up tons of seawater in a massive bucket and then trying to dump it into a pool used to store waste-fuel at reactor No. 3. An earlier explosion had blown the roof off of the building, exposing the storage pool and making the helicopter mission possible.

Because of radiation risk, the helicopters had to maintain considerable altitude. A government official said it wasn’t yet clear whether the water hit its target.

The race to build an emergency power supply for the crippled plant, combined with details from the early moments of the crisis, highlight new questions about the design and safety record of the facility, which is Japan’s oldest.

Common to all nuclear plants is this fundamental design problem: Engineers try to make the equipment impervious to one threat, but that may make it vulnerable to another.

In this case, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex’s back-up diesel-powered generators were built below ground level. This bunker-like positioning would protect the generators from an air strike, cyclone or typhoon—but made them more vulnerable to an earthquake-driven tsunami.

When last week’s giant waves struck, they immobilized the generators despite being designed to protect against water. The tsunami also apparently washed away the generators’ fuel tanks, which were above ground.

“The earthquake and tsunami we had last week both exceeded our engineering assumptions by a long shot,” said Tetsuo Ito, head of Kinki University’s Atomic Energy Research Institute, near Osaka. “The nuclear industry around the world probably will have to review how we set those assumptions in designing a nuclear power plant.”

Another area of scrutiny is the proximity of the plant’s six reactors to one another. Damage to one reactor contributed to damage to another, and their proximity hindered a recovery.

This arrangement can be found at other plants, because it can make it easier to move equipment around and helps to keep a smaller work force, said Mr. Ito. But now it looks like a “bad idea,” he said. “We need to strike a better balance of operational efficiency and safety.”

Terry Pickens, director of nuclear regulatory policy at Xcel Energy Inc. of the U.S., said there is no cookie-cutter reactor of the vintage of the Fukushima units because utilities in those days hired their own engineering firms and architects, and customized the plants’ designs. At Xcel’s Monticello plant in Minnesota, diesel generators are kept as far apart as possible so that “a natural phenomenon isn’t likely to take both of them out,” Mr. Pickens said.

The Japanese plant lost power during Friday’s earthquake. The three active reactors shut off automatically as designed, but a lack of electricity left workers unable to operate their cooling systems, leading to overheating. Tepco says the tsunami paralyzed all but one backup generator.

In a weekend briefing, Tepco Managing Director Akio Komori cited the elevation of the backup generators as one potential issue. A Tepco spokesman confirmed the remarks, adding that a full probe will have to wait while workers try to bring the reactors under control.

A spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the nation’s nuclear-power regulator, said Fukushima Daiichi’s emergency-generator design is “fairly prevalent” at other Japanese plants. The spokesman, Shigekatsu Ohmukai, disputed that the elevation of the generators was a problem. The agency, he said, had concluded that the plant could withstand a certain size of tsunami but “obviously the tsunami caused by Friday’s earthquake exceeded our assumptions. That’s the problem.”

Tepco tested the Fukushima Daiichi plant to withstand an earthquake magnitude of 7.9—a level of seismic activity the power company thought wouldn’t be surpassed in the area, according to company documents on its website from 2010. The quake that struck Friday, however, was about 10 times as big as that theoretical maximum.

In the U.S., where there are 23 similar reactors operated by 11 different companies, backup generators typically are housed in bunker-like buildings at ground level. They are designed with watertight fittings that are intended to keep out water from floods or hurricanes.

General Electric Co. designed three of the six reactors for Tepco at the Daiichi complex but it didn’t determine the layout of every piece of equipment, a company spokesman said. Some of that was done by architects and engineers hired by Tepco. He added that the main problem was the larger-then-expected tsunami, not the generator placement.

The Daiichi plant was central to a falsified-records scandal a decade ago that led Tepco to briefly shut down all its plants and led to the departure of a number of senior executives. Nuclear experts say that led to a number of disclosures of previously unreported problems at the plant.

>Will earthquake mean a third lost decade for Japan?

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In 1990, Japan was the economic paradigm. Growth was outpacing every other leading country. Its car and electronics industries put the rest of the world to shame.
Even its banks were poised for domination. Economists were confidently predicting that in just 10 years, Japan would be vying with the US to become the world’s largest economy.
Roll the clock forward two decades and the picture could hardly be more different. Japan’s economy is one third the size of America’s and has been relegated to third spot behind China. Far from growing at record pace, it managed a woeful average of 1pc a year in the 1990s and no better in the 2000s. So began Japan’s “lost decade”, which swiftly became two. And there has been precious little evidence that a third would be averted.
Last week’s earthquake and tsunami struck after the slow devastation that has seen Japan’s economy derailed. In 1992, the debt-fuelled asset bubble burst – crippling the banks.
Rather than repair their balance sheets, policymakers allowed the banks to limp on. Credit was drained from the economy, just as its companies were challenged by low-cost Asian rivals.
Japan’s dependence on exports, for so long the secret of its success, became its Achilles heel as demand at home failed to pick up the slack. With slow growth came the peril of deflation, as falling prices deterred investment and increased the relative cost of borrowing.
The government’s debt burden is now more than twice Japan’s output and the country remains locked in a deflationary spiral. Making the crisis critical is its demographic burden. By 2050, the population is forecast to have fallen from 127m to just over 100m – leaving an economy with spiralling health and pension costs serviced by a shrinking working population.
Japan’s worst recorded earthquake will only add to its problems. Credit Suisse estimates the disaster will cost $171bn (£105bn) in economic losses, 3pc of GDP.
Although few predict a collapse back into recession, Royal Bank of Scotland economists warned that power shortages may “heavily damage business activities”, a period of “national mourning” would deter consumption, stock markets could fall and yields on government debt would rise, making the reconstruction programme more expensive.
The effect on the economy is expected to be largely similar to the Kobe earthquake of 1995, though Credit Suisse thinks it will be less than half as expensive as the damage has been to less economically significant regions.
In 1995, no one thought the downturn in Japan’s fortunes would be anything other than temporary but the underlying trend proved to be stronger than any force of nature. In the immediate aftermath of Kobe, growth slumped but rebounded sharply afterwards as the rebuilding programme provided an effective fiscal stimulus. Once back on track, the economy then continued its slow decline.
RBS predicts a similar path this time, downgrading its growth forecasts for the first half of the year but expecting “upward pressure [in the second half] on increased public investments in reconstruction”. Stephen King, HSBC’s chief economist, also noted: “It is hard to see the underlying picture changing.”
There is more reason to be worried now, however. Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Société Générale in Tokyo, said the economy’s weakened state means the authorities will be able to afford only a third of the 3 trillion yen (£22bn) emergency budget set aside after Kobe. Unlike then, the government is already considering raising its 5pc consumption tax.
Other surprise developments may play out. Japan’s public debt is 98pc domestically funded. Further borrowings to pay for the relief effort are likely to be “in the spirit of a war loan”, Mr King said, as the public and companies repatriate cash to rebuild the nation. Money is already flowing back to Japan, putting pressure on the yen.
A higher yen would be damaging for the nation’s exporters, which could negatively impact the economy. The Bank of Japan has already taken measures to offset those forces, doubling its “money printing” programme to 10 trillion yen.
Optimists hope the crisis will reinvigorate the country, giving policymakers cover for necessary reforms. The Kobe experience, and the Niigata earthquake of 2007, offer little support for the theory. More likely is that the Sendai disaster will derail efforts to build on last year, when Japan produced a rare positive record – the fastest economic growth of the G7 industrialised nations.

>Japan Confronts Multiple Crises as Death Toll Climbs

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MINAMISANRIKU, Japan — Japanese authorities struggled to contain new nuclear emergencies on Tuesday and the death toll continued to climb as search teams began reaching towns and seaports that were flattened by last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
The National Police Agency said Tuesday afternoon that 2,478 people have died, and many thousands were still missing. Some 400,000 people were living in makeshift shelters or evacuation centers, officials said. Bitterly cold and windy weather that was pushing into northern Japan was compounding the misery as the region struggled with shortages of food, fuel and water.
An explosion Tuesday morning at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Station — the third reactor blast in four days — damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at reactor No. 2 , government officials said, and there was a growing fear of a catastrophic meltdown. The operator of the plants, Tokyo Electric Power Company, confirmed there had been radiation leaks, that water was being pumped into three overheated reactors and a fire had broken out at a fourth.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan made a nationally televised address on Tuesday morning, imploring people not to panic.
People living within about 12 miles of the reactor complexes at Fukushima were ordered to evacuate, and those within about 20 miles were told to stay indoors and close all windows, doors and vents. If people had laundry hanging outside, the government advised, they should not bring it inside or touch it.
Fears of a deepening nuclear crisis led to panic selling on Tuesday that drove down the Nikkei stock index by 10.6 percent.
The United States Geological Survey revised the magnitude of the earthquake to 9.0, from 8.9, but it was the subsequent tsunami that did the most damage. The initial wave scoured away entire communities, and desperate survivors searched Tuesday for signs of friends and relatives who remained missing.
There was plenty that was missing here in the fishing village of Minamisanriku: the city hall, the hospital, the shipyard, police stations — and 8,000 people.
The tsunami might have crashed most heavily into this town that once was home to more than 17,000. Situated at the back of a mountainous V-shaped cove, the town was swamped by the first surge of muck and seawater that was 30 feet high as it roared between the valley walls.
As the deluge pressed in on them, Sanae Sato, 71, said 400 townspeople rushed to the community center where she worked. They thought the five-story building would be high enough to protect them. But when the water reached the fourth floor, they all sought shelter in the attic, jammed in beside the elevator machinery.
From the attic window, Ms. Sato said, she saw the floodwaters hurling cars along, with drivers and passengers still inside. Houses broke from their foundations and were carried along, their owners perched on the ridges of the roofs.
“I saw people trying to balance on the rooftops like surfers,” she said. “It didn’t work. It was like hell.”
The Miyagi prefectural government said Tuesday that search teams had located 2,000 people in Minamisanriku who had been missing and presumed dead. They had fled to surrounding towns as the tsunami bashed the coastal areas of the town.
Troopers from Japan’s Self-Defense Forces cleared roadways into the village on Tuesday as a long line of fire trucks waited to enter. Closer to shore, teams of searchers rummaged through the crushed houses and collapsed shops. They peered into cars that had been swallowed by the mud, hoping to find survivors. Searched cars were marked with yellow tape.
One gruesome discovery was a mud-caked woman hanging by her head from the roof of a gas station. She was brought down, covered in a blue plastic tarp, and her body was laid by the station to await collection by another disaster team.
Rescue teams from 13 countries pressed on with the searches in other towns, some assisted by dogs. In the air, helicopters shuttled back and forth, part of a mobilization of some 100,000 troops, the largest since World War II.
Because Fukushima have been lost to the national power grid, Tokyo Electric announced plans for rolling blackouts across the region to conserve electricity — the first controlled power cutbacks in Japan in 60 years.
The first set of blackouts Tuesday morning began in four prefectures outside Tokyo. The utility, which provides service to 45 million people in the region, said the cuts could continue for six weeks.
Public conservation of electricity was significant enough, the company said, that the more drastic blackout scenarios were being scaled back. Still, anticipating deep and lengthy power cuts, many people were stocking up on candles, water, instant noodles and batteries for radios.

>In Tsunami’s Wake, Much Searching but Few Are Rescued

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The tsunami that barreled into northeast Japan on Friday was so murderous and efficient that not much was left when search-and-rescue teams finally reached Natori on Monday. There was searching, but not much rescuing. There was, essentially, nobody left to rescue.
The mournful scene here in Natori, a farm and fishing town that has been reduced to a vast muddy plain, was similar to rescue efforts in other communities along the coast as police, military and foreign assistance teams poked through splintered houses and piles of wreckage.The death toll from the 8.9-magnitude quake — the strongest in Japan’s seismically turbulent history — continued to climb, inexorably so, as officials uncovered more bodies. By Monday afternoon, the toll stood at 2,800 but many thousands of people remained unaccounted for and were presumed dead. Police officials said it was certain that more than 10,000 had died.
Police teams, for example, found about 1,000 bodies that had washed ashore on a scenic peninsula in Miyagi Prefecture, close to the epicenter of the quake that unleashed the tsunami. The bodies washed out as the tsunami retreated. Now they are washing back in.
A string of crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima also continued to bedevil engineers who were desperately trying to cool them down. The most urgent worries concerned the failures of two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where workers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had already leaked.
The building housing Reactor No. 1 exploded on Saturday, and a hydrogen buildup blew the roof off the No. 3 reactor facility on Monday morning. The blast did not appear to have harmed the reactor itself, government and utility officials said, but six workers were injured in the blasts.
Later Monday, a company official said Reactor No. 2 was losing cooling function and workers were pumping in water, according to Yukio Edano, the chief government spokesman.
The collective anxiety about Japan caused a rout in the Japanese stock market, and the main Nikkei index fell 6.2 percent in Monday’s trading, the worst drop in three years. The broader Topix, or Tokyo Stock Price index, dropped 7.4 percent. Worried about the severe strains on banking and financial systems, the Bank of Japan pumped about $180 billion into the economy on Monday, and the government was discussing an emergency tax increase to help finance relief and recovery work.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the country’s crippled nuclear power grid, announced plans for rotating blackouts across the region to conserve electricity — the first controlled power cuts in Japan in 60 years. Tokyo residents worriedly followed a series of confusing and apparently contradictory statements about the location and duration of the power cuts. Public conservation of electricity was significant enough, the company said, that the more drastic blackout scenarios were being scaled back.
Monday’s explosion at the Daiichi plant was the latest development in what Japan’s prime minister has called the nation’s worst crisis since World War II.
Japan’s $5 trillion economy, the third largest in the world, was threatened with severe disruptions and partial paralysis as many industries shut down and the armed forces and volunteers mobilized for the far more urgent effort of finding survivors, evacuating residents near the stricken power plants and caring for the victims of the 8.9 magnitude quake that struck on Friday.
The disaster has left more than 10,000 people dead, many thousands homeless and millions without water, power, heat or transportation.
The death toll was certain to climb as searchers began to reach coastal villages that essentially vanished under the first muddy surge of the tsunami, which struck the nation’s northern Pacific coast near the port city of Sendai. In one town alone, the port of Minamisanriku, a senior police official said the number of dead would “certainly be more than 10,000.” That is more than half the town’s population of 17,000.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan told a news conference in Tokyo late Sunday: “I think that the earthquake, tsunami and the situation at our nuclear reactors makes up the worst crisis in the 65 years since the war. If the nation works together, we will overcome.”
The government ordered 100,000 troops — nearly half the country’s active military force and the largest mobilization in postwar Japan — to take part in the relief effort. An American naval strike group led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan also arrived off Japan on Sunday to help with refueling, supply and rescue duties.
The quake and tsunami did not reach Japan’s industrial heartland, although economists said the power blackouts could affect industrial production — notably carmakers, electronics manufacturers and steel plants — and interrupt the nation’s famously efficient supply chain. Tourism was also bound to plummet, as the United States, France and other nations urged citizens to avoid traveling to Japan.
AIR Worldwide, a risk consultant in Boston, said its disaster models estimated property damage to be as high as $35 billion. The company said 70 percent of residential construction in Japan was wood, and earthquake insurance was not widely used.
Amid the despair and the worry over an unrelenting series of strong aftershocks, there was one bright moment when the Japanese Navy rescued a 60-year-old man who had been floating at sea for two days.
The man, Hiromitsu Arakawa, clung to the roof of his tiny home in the town of Minamisoma after it was torn from its foundations by the first wave of the tsunami, the Defense Ministry said. He saw his wife slip away in the deluge, but he hung on as the house drifted away. He was discovered late Sunday morning, still on his roof, nine miles south of the town and nine miles out to sea.
The quake was the strongest to hit Japan, which sits astride the “ring of fire” that designates the most violent seismic activity in the Pacific Basin.
About 80,000 people were ordered to evacuate danger zones around the two compromised atomic facilities in Fukushima Prefecture. Japanese officials reported that 22 people showed signs of radiation exposure and as many as 170 were feared to have been exposed, including some who had been outside one of the plants waiting to be evacuated. Three workers were suffering what officials described as full-blown radiation sickness.
In a televised address the trade minister, Banri Kaieda, asked businesses to limit power use as they returned to operation on Monday. He asked specifically for nighttime cutbacks of lights and heating. The power company said the blackouts would affect three million customers, including homes and factories.
The Japan Railways Group cut operations at six of its commuters lines and two bullet trains to 20 percent of normal to conserve electricity.
Tokyo and central Japan continued to be struck by aftershocks off the eastern coast of Honshu Island. A long tremor registering 6.2 caused buildings in central Tokyo to sway dramatically on Sunday morning.
Search teams from more than a dozen nations were bound for Japan, including a unit from New Zealand, which suffered a devastating quake last month in Christchurch. A Japanese team that had been working in New Zealand was called home.
A combined search squad from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Va., arrived from the United States with 150 people and a dozen dogs that would help in the search for bodies.
Assistance teams were also expected from China and South Korea, two of Japan’s most bitter rivals.
Tokyo’s acceptance of help — along with a parade of senior officials who offered updates at televised news conferences on Sunday — was in marked contrast to the government’s policies after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,000 people. Japan refused most offers of aid at the time, restricted foreign aid operations and offered little information about the disaster.
In Sendai, a city of roughly a million people near the center of the catastrophe, many buildings cracked but none had collapsed. Still, city officials said that more than 500,000 households and businesses were without water, and many more lacked electricity as well.
Soldiers surrounded Sendai’s city hall, where officials were using two floors to shelter evacuees and treat the injured, using power drawn from a generator. Thousands of residents sought refuge inside and waited anxiously for word from their relatives. A line of people waited outside with plastic bottles and buckets in hand to collect water from a pump.
Masaki Kokubum, 35, has been living at the city hall since the quake. He had worked at a supermarket, and his neighborhood lost power and water. He said he had not slept in three days.
“I can’t sleep,” he said as he sat in a chair in a hallway. “I just sit here and wait.”

>Earthquakes 101: How they happen

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The horrifying images of destruction out of Japan make the scope of Friday’s disaster all too clear. A magnitude 8.9 earthquake and resulting tsunami left devastating damage.
Why and how do such temblors happen?
It all has to do with plates that make up the Earth’s crust moving around, seismologist James Gaherty, a Lamont associate research professor at Columbia University explained to “Early Show on Saturday Morning” co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis.
“Most earthquakes occur on the boundaries of the very large tectonic plates that make up the outer rigid crust of the earth,” Gaherty said. “These plates are all shifting around relative to each other, in many places moving fairly rapidly, inches per year relative to each other, and they push against each other, some places going underneath, other places rubbing past each other. So, the western part of the Pacific Ocean, for example, the ‘Ring of Fire’ (earthquake hotbed along the Pacific Rim) — that all takes place on these tectonic boundaries. That’s where we get these earthquakes.
“In this part of Japan, basically, the Pacific Plate is trying to move underneath the Earth’s crust where Japan sits. … It’s moving down underneath, constantly building up pressure as it tries to move underneath and, in this case, it releases that pressure, and these very large earthquakes occur in a very large area along the entire length of the coastline of Japan … on the order of 200 miles along the length and 100 miles offshore, all sliding on one large fault at the same time.”
The pace of mega-quakes seems to be picking up, Gaherty continued. “These kinds of events are very well-understood in Japan. The fact that they have large events on the order of magnitude 8 is something they’ve had many times over their history. This one is a little bit unusual in that we’re not necessarily expecting something quite as large as this. These mega-quakes, more like a magnitude 9, are very rare, even over geologic history looking back. We have a hard time finding evidence of them. We’ve observed now three, really, in the last six years, since Sumatra. So we seem to be in a period of very active occurrence of these. But how the really big quakes develop is something that we’re really trying to understand.”
Why such an active period now? “It’s probably just random statistics. … There were events in 1960, 1964, that are about this magnitude. But then, there was kind of a quiet period of about 40 years. We’ve now entered a period where this kind of activity has (increased) again.”
The Ring of Fire is as active as it is, Gaherty said, due to “those tectonic plates and how they’re moving relative to each other. The Pacific Plate happens to be a large, coherent plate that’s moving at a fairly high velocity relative to the other plates around it. So it’s continually interacting with it. On the Western side of that system, in Japan … it’s pushing underneath. Those are the kind of earthquakes that tend to be the largest, and also tend to be the kind of earthquakes that are pushing, moving material up and down that cause tsunamis. That’s one of the reasons why it’s such a destructive part of the system.”
And the Earth’s crust isn’t finished with Japan this time around, either. “There are going to continue to be large aftershocks of this earthquake,” Gaherty said. “We would expect, for typically a rule of thumb, for the largest aftershock after a big earthquake like this, it’s about one magnitude unit smaller. A magnitude 8 earthquake can still cause a significant tsunami. Certainly not of the devastating level of this one. But still something to keep an eye on.
“These things propagate out very efficiently from the earthquake. … The energy travels very efficiently in the water, and so we do tend to see these spread out over the entire basin of the Pacific, and they can affect regions very far from the event.”

>Damage at two Japan nuclear plants prompts evacuations

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After the tsunami damages the cooling systems at five reactors in northeastern Japan, officials take steps to avert the possibility of a meltdown.
Japanese officials struggled Saturday to avert the possibility of a meltdown at two major nuclear power plants whose emergency cooling systems were damaged by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami.
Emergency officials ordered the evacuation Saturday of all civilians within a six-mile radius of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which is about 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, after its normal backup cooling systems failed and it became necessary to release radioactive steam to relieve pressure that could cause an explosion.
Several hours later, authorities revealed that cooling systems at the Fukushima No. 2 plant, a few miles south, had also failed, and evacuations were ordered around that plant as well.
In all, five reactors at the two plants were damaged.
Radiation levels in the control room at Fukushima No. 1 were reported to be as high as 1,000 times normal, while levels outside the plant were said to be about eight to nine times normal, indicating some leakage of radiation had already occurred.
Shaking from the magnitude-8.9 earthquake triggered an automatic safety procedure at 11 of Japan’s 55 commercial nuclear reactors. At those plants, control rods were plunged into the cores, where the radioactive fuel rods are kept, to bring electricity production to a halt.
But the cores continued to produce massive amounts of heat that needed to be cooled.
The cooling system must continually pump water from a large pond that surrounds the core through a set of towers that keep the water at a safe temperature. Otherwise, the water will boil off, the fuel rods will melt, and there is a possibility that radioactive material will escape from the reactor’s containment dome — a so-called meltdown.
“If they can’t get adequate cooling to the core, it could be a Three Mile Island or worse,” said nuclear physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is working to improve the safety of nuclear power. The loss of coolant at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania for only 30 minutes led to a 50% meltdown of the core in that 1979 accident.
The pumps normally obtain electricity from the grid. But the Fukushima prefecture’s grid was badly damaged by the tsunami, cutting power needed to cool the fuel rods. Though reactors have diesel emergency generators to provide backup electricity, those at Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 also were apparently damaged by the tsunami.
The reactors have backup batteries, and operators used them to restore the flow of coolant at the No. 1 plant. But those batteries have a life of no more than about eight hours, experts said.
Officials of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday they had obtained more batteries and may use military helicopters to fly them to the site.
Authorities said that pressure had already built up inside the containment building at the No. 1 plant to about 50% above normal and that they had begun venting radioactive gas into the atmosphere, although they said there was no danger from the release.
“Rising containment pressure is not a good sign that they have things under control,” Lyman said. “We need to get better information from the Japanese about what is going on, but the few things that are coming out are very worrisome.”
The reactors at the two plants use some of the oldest nuclear technology, dating to the 1960s. “These first-generation boiling-water reactors have the least margin of safety of any reactor design,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a Princeton University physicist and former White House advisor.
Without electrical power to circulate water inside the core, the cooling water would begin to boil off, he said.
But despite the dangers, some experts said the nuclear plant operators should be able to add new cooling water and keep the core fully immersed while it cools down.
“It doesn’t sound like we are in meltdown mode,” Von Hippel said.
Jim Walsh of MIT’s Center of International Studies agreed that these reactors will probably be OK. But there are other facilities in Japan that produce enriched fuel for reactors and manage highly radioactive waste, some of which are in remote areas in the north, “and no one has said ‘boo’ about them,” he said. “It’s not inconceivable that some of them have had problems. The story may continue to unfold in the next few weeks.”
Long before the problems created by the tsunami, a series of serious incidents in Japan’s ambitious civilian nuclear power industry over the last decade have raised concerns about its attention to safety and the role of government regulators.
The history of Japan’s nuclear incidents includes a pattern of problems being kept secret or passed off as far less serious than they actually were.
In 2007, several electric utilities admitted covering up accidents, including one that experienced an uncontrolled nuclear reaction inside a reactor while it was shut down for maintenance. The same year, Tokyo Electric Power Co. — which operates the two Fukushima plants — apologized for a radiation leak caused by an earthquake at a plant that had not been built to withstand a quake of that magnitude.
In 2004, five workers at a nuclear plant in western Japan were killed when a corroded pipe burst and sprayed them with boiling water and steam, revealing flaws in safety procedures.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday that American nuclear reactors are not vulnerable to the sequence of events that overtook the Japanese reactors because regulations here take into account the specific vulnerabilities at each plant under the most extreme conditions possible.
In the case of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, operated by Edison International in northwestern San Diego County, a 30-foot seawall protects the plant and its emergency generators from the maximum theoretical tsunami that could hit the site, said regulatory commission spokesman Scott Burnell.
Edison International spokesman Chris Abel said the seawall is just one of several redundant systems meant to ensure power for an orderly shutdown in the event of an emergency.
In Japan, the shutdown of the 11 nuclear reactors affects perhaps 8% of the country’s electrical generating capacity. Most of those plants should be able to go back on line within a few days, though it may be longer before repairs can be made to damaged power lines that carry electricity from the plants to consumers.

>Tsunami warning: Coast residents evacuate; damage at Santa Cruz harbor

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One of the docks at the Santa Cruz harbor was destroyed today as tsunami waves generated from a powerful earthquake in Japan hit Northern California and prompted the evacuation of hundreds of people from the coast.
There were also reports of significant damage in the harbor in Crescent City, located near the California-Oregon border, where 35 boats were crushed.
The damage was less severe at the Santa Cruz harbor, but one of the docks — known as the U dock– was destroyed in spectacular fashion.
“The dock, it looked like an explosion,” said Michael Sack, co-owner of Sanctuary Cruises. “The dock just blew up. It buckled and it splintered.”
Sack said a 30-foot boat sank and at least four other boats broke loose.
“They were just floating back and forth in the harbor, slammed into other boats,” Sack said, adding his 48-foot whale watching boat was not damaged.
Toby Goddard, a member of the city’s port commission, said the water like a river surging rather than a big wave. Sack described it in similar fashion.
“It was like a 10 to 15 mile an hour current,” Sack said. “It started slow and came up about five feet.”
There were at least eight to 10 big surges into the harbor, coming about every 10 minutes.
Some boats broke loose, others tipped over, their masts smashing into other boats. Throughout the harbor there was debris floating everywhere, tires, coolers, chunks of wood.
In Capitola, water surges approached the top of the sea wall but did not breach it, according to a city official.
The National Weather Service issued a tsunami warning for much of California’s coast following the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck off Japan’s northeastern coast earlier today.
Not long after the first waves began to hit the Santa Cruz coast about 8 a.m., boats were seen floating out of the harbor. Crescent City Councilman Rich Enea told the Times-Standard 35 boats were crushed and the harbor suffered major damage. At 10 a.m., the coastal community was waiting for larger surges to hit.
Early this morning, the weather service issued a tsunami warning telling people who live along the coastlines to move inland to higher ground. As hundreds of people drove away from the coast near Half Moon Bay and parked along Highway 92 and Skyline Boulevard in San Mateo County, one fisherman was heading for the waves.
Duncan Maclean got into his boat, the Barbara Faye, and headed out to sea this morning when he heard a tsunami was coming.
“It’s the safest place to be in a tsunami,” Maclean said. “I have a substantial investment here I have to protect.”
A few other fishermen out at Pillar Point Harbor were following his lead this morning.
“There’s a big swell that seems to building, but I don’t think it’s coming from a tsunami. I think its coming from a storm,” said Maclean, who was about six miles off the Half Moon Bay shore as of 9:05 a.m. “I think it’s not going to hit as severely as they predicted.”
It was a similar scene along Highway 17 at Summit Road.
The first waves hit the Monterey Harbor at about 7:50 a.m. and were about 2.4 feet higher than what is normally seen, according to Diana Henderson of the weather service. Waves first hit San Francisco at about 8:20 p.m.
Once the first waves arrive, the warning may remain in effect for hours. The waves could peak two to three hours after their initial arrival.
“It’s not just one big wave,” said Diana Henderson, a forecaster with the weather service. “It’s a series of waves which could be dangerous for as much as 10 to 10 hours after the initial wave arrival.”
The tsunami warning didn’t prevent the usual crop of surfers from taking to the water off Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz. A crowd of six at sunrise at the spot known as The Hook at the base of 41st Avenue had swelled to 20 by 7 a.m.
While a few were playing it safe — “I’m getting out by 7:30; can’t justify it to the wife and kids,” said one — others seemed to be passing it off as a typically overhyped natural event that may or may not even be noticed.
By 7:30 a.m., minutes from the tsunami’s expected arrival, the water was still littered with surfers and a half dozen more were perched atop the cliff above, deciding whether to put on their own wetsuits and paddle out. Though an electronic sign next to O’Neill Surf Shop on 41st Avenue flashed “TSUNAMI WARNING,” more cars were pressing onward than turning back — a number of them with surfboards strapped to the roof.
In San Mateo County at the intersection of Highway 92 and Skyline Boulevard, about 1,000 cars were parked along both roadways as residents of Half Moon Bay looked to find higher ground. At 8:30 a.m., the roadway resembled a strip mall parking lot as vehicles jammed into medians, breakdown areas and along the shoulder.
While some people remained in their cars, there were some children playing on a grassy area near the median.
Martin Quijano, 25, of Half Moon Bay, received a phone call from a friend at about 4 a.m. and immediately got into his car and drove toward Skyline Boulevard. At first he was scared but is now anxious to get home.
CHP officer Art Montiel is urging motorists to try and park on Skyline Boulevard.
San Mateo County school districts in Half Moon Bay, Pacifica and the Pescadero area were all closed Friday as officials waited for the tsunami.
Officials in Pacifica set up shelters at Terra Nova and Oceana high schools, but the only people who showed up were looking to get a better view of the waves. Oceana High sits on a hill and overlooks the ocean.
“There’s nobody in the shelter except the people running it,” Oceana Principal April Holland said. “We had almost nobody show up.”
At San Francisco International Airport, all inbound flights from Tokyo are canceled, but all Hawaiian flights are operating normally, airport spokesman Mike McCarron said.
In Northern California, waves could reach as high as 5.3 feet, according to the weather service.
The tide began rising shortly after 7:30 a.m. along beaches in Crescent City, where the tsunami was expected to hit the hardest in California. Officials predicted that waves could reach as high as 7 feet.
In Santa Cruz, access to the beach flats including the Boardwalk and municipal wharf will be closed for the duration of the tsunami warning, according to police. The road closings include: Beach Street at Municipal Wharf, Riverside Avenue at Third Street, Laurel Street Extension at Third Street and Pacific Avenue at Center Street.
Santa Cruz city officials advised about 6,600 people in the city’s tsunami inundation zone to evacuate, according to Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark. The order is an advisory, not mandatory. That includes the Beach Flats area, along West Cliff Drive, the harbor area and along the San Lorenzo River.
Officials in San Francisco closed Great Highway, Ocean Beach and other city beaches.
Although emergency officials are reminding residents to avoid the coastlines today, there are plenty of onlookers trying to catch a glimpse of the waves.
As spectators gathered near the Pacifica boardwalk, a couple walking their dog along the sea wall said they weren’t frightened by the reports and had no intention of evacuating. They were dubious of news and weather reports.
“They also told us it was going to snow a few weeks ago,” said Matt Jetty, 31, of Pacifica.
Mark Johnsson, a geologist from the California Coastal Commission, said onlookers were probably expecting movie-style waves.
“Hollywood made it seem like big, huge crashing waves,” Johnsson said. “But it’s more just a big, gradual inundation.”
Johnsson was out from 8 to 9 a.m. In that hour, he said he had seen two tsunami waves.
One man hopped over the sea wall and onto the beach.
“I wouldn’t be walking on that beach right now. No way.” Johnsson said.

>Japanese nuclear reactor in peril

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Japanese authorities and the U.S. military on Saturday were racing to find ways to deliver new backup generators or batteries to a nuclear power reactor whose cooling facilities have been crippled by a loss of power as a result of the earthquake.
The reactor, owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co., is currently drawing on battery power that may last only a few hours. Without electricity, the reactor will be unable to pump water to cool its hot reactor core, possibly leading to a meltdown or some other release of radioactive material.
Japanese authorities informed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Incident and Emergency Center that they have ordered the evacuation of about 3,000 residents within a 1.9-mile radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and told people within a 16.2-mile radius to remain indoors, according to the IAEA Web site.
The cooling problem is with the second of six reactors at the plant, located on the east coast of Japan about 200 miles north of Tokyo and south of the heavily damaged town of Sendai. Separately there were reports of elevated radiation levels inside the control room of one of the other reactor units, which was built 40 years ago. Sources said that the authorities were contemplating venting from that unit.
Altogether, 11 Japanese nuclear reactors shut down automatically as they are designed to do in case of an earthquake.
“The multi-reactor Fukushima atomic power plant is now relying on battery power, which will only last around eight hours,” said Kevin Kamps, a specialist in nuclear waste at Beyond Nuclear, a group devoted to highlighting the perils of nuclear power. “The danger is the very thermally hot reactor cores at the plant must be continuously cooled for 24 to 48 hours. Without any electricity, the pumps won’t be able to pump water through the hot reactor cores to cool them.”
“There’s a basic cooling system that requires power, which they don’t have,” said Glenn McCullough, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority who has been keeping track of the situation in Japan. He said that as a result of the tsunami, water had gotten into the diesel generators that would otherwise have provided backup power.
In a statement that confused nuclear experts, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday morning that U.S. Air Force planes in Japan had delivered “coolant” to a nuclear power plant affected by the quake. Nuclear reactors do not use special coolants, only large amounts of pumped water.
“They have very high engineering standards, but one of their plants came under a lot of stress with the earthquake and didn’t have enough coolant,” she said, “and so Air Force planes were able to deliver that.” It remained unclear what the Air Force had delivered.
Just hours after the quake, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) declared a heightened state of alert at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, according to the IAEA. NISA said that no release of radiation has been detected.
The evacuation comes after NISA said Friday that a fire broke out at the Onagawa nuclear power plant but was later extinguished.
The plant is about 45 miles north of the city of Sendai, which was badly damaged by the deadly earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan Friday afternoon. Sendai is the population center nearest the epicenter of the quake, and Japan’s Kyodo News agency said that more than 200 bodies had been found so far near the city.
The key buildings in the Onagawa plant are about 15 meters above sea level, according to the Web site of Tohoku Electric Power, owner of the plant. The company said that was about twice the height of the previous highest tsunami.
Japanese authorities told the IAEA that that the Onagawa, Fukushima-Daini and Tokai nuclear power plants shut down automatically, and no radiation release has been detected. The plants have multiple nuclear reactors.
The IAEA said it is seeking details on Fukushima Daiichi and other nuclear power plants and research reactors, including information on off-site and on-site electrical power supplies, cooling systems and the condition of the reactor buildings. Nuclear fuel requires continued cooling even after a plant is shut down, the IAEA noted. “This is the most challenging seismic event on record, so it is a severe test,” said McCullough. “Clearly the Japanese government is taking this very seriously.”

>Tsunami Reaches California After Soaking Hawaii

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A tsunami wave reached the West Coast of the U.S. this morning with threats of waves as tall as nine feet that could strike from California to Alaska.
Residents along the northern California and Oregon coasts reported seeing the tell-tale sign of an impending tsunami — the waterline quickly withdrawing from the beach prior to large incoming waves.
The tsunami, which has claimed hundreds of lives in Japan, triggered warning sirens across the Pacific and led to evacuations as far away as Hawaii and Oregon.
By the time the tsunami reached California around 7:45 a.m. PST, it had soaked Hawaii’s beaches but done little lasting damage there.
Officials were cautiously optimistic that the West Coast would fare similarly, but warned of waves as high as 9 feet, and banned boaters and surfers in California from entering the water.
Warning sirens began blaring in some Oregon coastal communities in the small hours of the morning, and residents were urged to seek higher ground.
Orgeon officials said highways were congested with residents evacuating low lying ares near Florence.
Sam McAlmond, a resident of Gold Beach, Ore., chose not to evacuate, but is prepared to leave his home if it becomes necesary.
“This doesn’t happen too often. We liked to see it if and when anything happens,” he said of the tsunami. “We have all of our necessary equipment — fresh water and food. Filled up the tank with gas and there is an escape route.”
McAlmond said he had not seen any significant waves from his beach front home.
In California, the city of San Francisco activated it’s emergency operations response team and closed its coastal highway. All coastal access to San Francisco area beaches have been closed.
The 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit Japan Friday afternoon local time, triggering a tsunami that is speeding across the Pacific Ocean at speeds of 500 mph, as fast as a jet airplane.
Hawaii Gets Soaked But More Waves Anticipated
The tsunami reached Hawaii around 3:30 a.m. local time. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center says Kauai was the first island hit early by the wave, which quickly swept through the Hawaiian Island chain. There were no immediate reports of serious damage.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey the first wave to hit is not as large as experts anticipated, but bigger ones are expected to follow.
Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie ordered the evacuation of coastal areas. Through the night, residents waited on lines to buy gas, bottled water, canned food and generators.
At least tens of thousands of people were evacuated and there were reports of fighting at gas stations as people fuel up their cars to move inland in Hawaii.
“We have been hearing those reports and we’ve asked everybody to stop doing that, to get out of the way and that their hindering the evacuation,” Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle said.
“It’s not just a wave, it’s a series of waves and no one knows which one will be the strongest, no one knows which one will do the most of damage and we don’t even know how long they will last, they could last for a series of hours,” Carlisle said.
Officials did not regret the call for evacuations. “We called this right. This evacuation was necessary,” said geophysicist Gerard Fryer in Hawaii. “There’s absolutely no question, this was the right thing to do.”
Brian Shiro of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the tsunami that will reach the Wes Coast “loses a little bit of power because of friction from the bottom of the ocean, but this tsunami is pretty sufficient.”
Shiro said the West Coast could see waves as high as 9 feet.
“Some places in California will see 6 feet in some cases 9 feet. This could certainly be a bad day for people on the beach. If you have a house right on the water… it could be flooded,” he said.
Tsunami Racing Across the Pacific at 500 MPH
The tsunami is expected to hit Los Angeles at 8:30 a.m. local time, but another, bigger wave is expected two hours later when the tide is higher, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The 8.9 magnitude earthquake is the fifth largest ever recorded and extended along a 400 mile fault zone.