Anniversary of the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

[betsuni]

"Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard, and smelled something subtly different. ... The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai ... . The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat. It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. ... 'It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn't like the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.' ... 'What stays in my memory is pine trees, and the legs and arms of the children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.'

"For the first time in a century of human development, the land was in a historic, virgin darkness. No illuminated windows blazed upwards to obscure the patterning of the night sky; without traffic lights, drivers stayed off the unlit streets. The stars in their constellations and the blue river of the Milky Way were vivid in a way that few inhabitants of the developed world would ever see. 'Before nightfall, snow fell,' Kaneta said. 'All the dust of modern life was washed by it to the ground. It was sheer darkness. And it was intensely silent, because there were no cars. It was the true night sky that we hardly ever see, the sky filled with stars. Everyone who saw it talks about that sky.'

"'There were strange smells of dead bodies and mud. ... The men of religion began to feel self-conscious. ... 'The Christian pastor was trying to sing hymns, but none of the hymns in the book seemed right. I couldn't even say the sutra -- it came out in screams and shouts.' The priests lurched uselessly in the rubble in their rich robes, croaking the scriptures, getting in the way. 'And when we got to the sea -- we couldn't face it. It was if we couldn't interpret what we were seeing.' He said, 'We realized that, for all we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. ... I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and the only way forward was to take it off.'

Richard Lloyd Parry, "Ghosts of the Tsunami, Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone"

[brer cat]

1. K&R

[BigmanPigman]

2. I must have seen over 30 videos of the tsunami

hitting various areas of Japan. The geography of the landscape really directed where the water would go, sometimes making it into a whirlpool in a bay. Places like that had 100' waves. In that swiftly moving water is concrete, metal, wood, etc. and it hits you hard. It's really bad when the water comes in but also when it goes out again and there are multiple sets of these waves.

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[betsuni]

5. Every year I start watching a few but then can't stop, it's horrible and fascinating.

Another documentary I like is "Children of the Tsunami," and there was one where survivors were interviewed but I can't find it.

As you said, each place was different. One factor was paying attention to the "tsunami stones," old stone markers where tsunami waters had reached in the past, with warnings not to build below the marker. People evacuating to higher ground in 2011 told of frantically urging others to do the same and being ignored. Too much faith in seawalls and technology, not enough being terrified of the power of nature (and living by a Better Safe Than Sorry philosophy) and teaching history.

Our neighborhood emergency siren went off at 2:46 this afternoon, the time of the earthquake. To remember.

[BigmanPigman]

8. I watch videos of the Boxing Day Tsunami

and I can see how well prepared the citizens of Japan were. They have done so much to lesson the number of lives lost and buildings being dangerous. If that size quake and tsunami happened anywhere else there would have been much higher numbers.

[betsuni]

9. And the journalist whose book I quoted in the OP said that afterwards when people

were living in shelters: "I pictured a school gymnasium in northern England, rather than northern Japan, in which hundreds of people were living and sleeping literally head to toe. By this stage, they would have been murdering one other."

[Wednesdays]

6. Yup, just one cubic meter of water weighs one metric ton

So, the force of all that water is like being hit by a hundred freight trains.

[electric_blue68]

3. Woah! I remember those vids!

[leftstreet]

4. DURec

[NNadir]

7. Well if you follow this event as closely as I have, one will notice...

...that despite close to 20,000 people killed by seawater and its effects on buildings, and the lack of a death toll associated with radiation connected with the destroyed nuclear reactors, there has been no discussion of the safety of coastal cities and never-ending prattling about the safety of nuclear power plants.

With respect to deaths connected with the energy consequences of the event, they mostly involved deaths caused by shutting nuclear plants and replacing them with fossil fuel plants. Fossil fuel plants kill people whenever they operate normally, whereas nuclear plants don't.