RELATED: Police officials say that the death toll from Japan’s massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami is likely to exceed 18,000. Hitoshi Sugawara, a police spokesman, said on Monday that Miyagi, one of the of the hardest-hit prefectures, might account for 15,000 deaths alone. “It is very distressing as we recover more bodies day by days,” Sugawara said. The National Police Agency said the overall number of bodies collected so far stood at 8,649 and some 13,262 people have been listed as missing. The financial cost of the disaster was estimated to be some $235 billion, the World Bank said […]
JAPANIMATION: Nuclear Poo Poo Fallout Boy
RELATED: BBC reports that Japan’s nuclear agency raised the assessment of the severity of the crisis from level 4 to 5 on a 7-level international scale for nuclear accidents, matching an earlier assessment by the head of France’s Nuclear Safety Authority Tuesday. Level 5 is used to describe an accident with “wider consequences.” The move puts it on the same level as the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the US, and two levels below the Chernobyl meltdown. MORE RELATED: Astonishing ‘Before’ And ‘After’ Satellite Images Of Japan
A Heartbreaking Story Of Staggering Heartbreak
DAILY MAIL: Even amid the carnage and despair of Japan’s tsunami victims, the plight of the 30 children at Kama Elementary School is heartbreaking. They sit quietly in the corner of a third-floor classroom where they have waited each day since the tsunami swept into the town of Ishinomaki for their parents to collect them. So far, no one has come and few at the school now believe they will. Teachers think that some of the boys and girls, aged between eight and 12, know their fathers and mothers are among the missing and will never again turn up at […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Wave Of Mutilation
NEWSWEEK: All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent—which can be withdrawn at any time. For hundreds, maybe for thousands of people, this consent was withdrawn with shocking suddenness—all geological events are sudden, and all are unexpected if not necessarily entirely unanticipated—at 2:46 on this past clear, cool spring Friday afternoon. One moment all were going about […]
Massive Earthquake & Tsunami Rocks Japan
NEW YORK TIMES: The Japanese government declared an “atomic power emergency” and evacuated thousands of residents living close to a nuclear plant in northern Japan after a major earthquake. Japan relies heavily on nuclear power, and it generates just over a third of the country’s total electricity. The facilities are designed to withstand earthquakes, which are common in Japan, but experts have long expressed concerns about safety standards at the plants, particularly about the impact a major quake could have if it hit close to a reactor. At least two other Japanese nuclear plants also reported trouble, but there was […]