Friday, April 15, 2011

It can happen here

Last night at the monthly amateur radio club meeting I learned a feature of Google Earth with which I had not been familiar, to wit, that there is a "timeline" feature so you can look at historical data on an area.  It was being used to show the devastation of areas of Japan after the 9.0 quake and resulting tsunami.

Speaking of which, here is a scary video someone had the presence of mind--or maybe lack thereof--to shoot in the Japanese port town of Kessenuma.

Those cars are being tossed around like rubber duckies.
h/t Emergency Management.

There are lots more like that, of course; I noticed that, for a people who are supposed to be better prepared to deal with disaster than the rest of the planet combined, the first reaction for a lot of Japanese this time around was to whip out their cell phones and start filming...
Or throw themselves on their equipment or merchandise and try to make it hold still.

KOMO 4 TV's "Problem Solvers" program ran a special called "What If?", about the dangers here in "Pugetopolis."  They included embed code, but it's 45 minutes long, so I think not.
Find it here.
See the links after the show for more data.

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