Tragedy In Japan

For the first forty-six years of my life I lived in California, where I experienced several earthquakes first hand.  One of the biggies was the Northridge Quake in January 1994, with an epicenter only about ten miles from our home.  That was a shake I'll long remember but the quake was only a 6.7 (moment of magnitude) on the Richter Scale.  All the same, it was plenty big enough for me.  During that quake thirty-three people were killed, thousands injured and Southern California suffered tremendous damage.

In California we lived with the thought that "The Big One" might occur at any time but nobody dwelt on it.  If it happened, it happened.  We knew that if we were there when it did happen, there was nothing we could do about it.  Sound engineering preparation was our only hope, as the sky scrapers and highways in Los Angeles supposedly were designed to survive it.  For the most part they did survive the Northridge Quake but that was only a 6.7 shaker.  Luckily, we never got the big one.

Last year a 7.0 quake hit the island nation of Haiti with enough force (three times the shaking amplitude of the Northridge Quake) to demolish much of the country and kill a Haitian government estimate of 316,000 people.  As terrible as that tragedy was in loss of life, it was not the big one.  Much of the damage and resulting loss of life in Haiti would probably not have occurred if building codes and requirements had been similar to those in California--or Japan.

Japan got The Big One.  I saw a report yesterday afternoon that, although much of the media is still calling the Japan Quake an 8.9, the US Geological Survey had upgraded it to a 9.0.  If the relative measures of the Richter scale are to be believed and accepted, the Japan Quake would have had a shaking amplitude 100 times greater than the Haiti quake of 2010.

The toll of damage, injury and loss of life is far from finished in Japan but the Japanese people will be struggling with the aftermath for decades.  In the final tally, much of the damage and loss of life will have been caused by the tsunami, rather than the quake itself.  How much of the tally will have been caused by damage to the nuclear power plants is an unknown and may take decades to determine.

My heart aches for the people of Japan.