15 March Tokyo, airport to hotel -
lost in translation.
There were just four people in the "Welcome to
Japan line" at passport control. The other 260 passengers on the
plane from Seattle headed directly for the connecting lounge. Japan had
survived its M=9.0 earthquake, so why were they leaving so soon?
As I reflected on this I absentmindedly checked all
the usual questions on the entry form - Have you ever been to convicted of
forgery?, Have you ever visited a farm? Have you ever been refused a Japan
visa? Have you ever been deported from Japan? The polite Japanese customs
lady looked at my form "Are you sure", she said. Her raised
eyebrows signified I had checked yes to all the questions. I went
to the back of the three-person line and highlighted all the no's. She
smiled. "Welcome to Japan". With no opportunities for further blunders in
customs, and nothing further to declare, I stepped through the swing-door into
a damp-looking afternoon in Japan.
Smiling curious faces and well-dressed chauffeurs
lined the entrance barricade. For reading material emerging passengers
were presented with a mixed bag of signs on sticks" Mr. Taylor Biscuit
Alternatives" , "Ms. Kelly Microsap Products", "Hyatt welcomes Dr Grundale " .
And there he was. A man dressed in black leather with an Everest Base camp fur
hat with earlobes and a face mask. His sign said "Roger ". Was
I the Roger he sought?
Questions produced no response other than "you
Logel come me". I dutifully followed . The van set off erratically
as he stabbed his Japanese GPS road map with his left hand, and steered around
barriers and policemen into oncoming traffic with his right. I knew that
Japan drives on the left, but my driver apparently did not.
It was pretty cold, and in fact snowing north of
Tokyo, which is why my driver was wearing base camp attire. His garb was
apparently very effective because for the anticipated 1 hour drive to the
city he wound down all the windows and turned off the heat with the
announcement - "Hi. GPS say 2 hour". So we are going north of
the city tonight, are we? "Hi" . I dug into my bag and pulled
out hat and coat and GPS unit. But the wind-chill factor was pretty
stiff even so. Behind his ear-muffed mountain garb and face mask he
hummed happily, and tuned in Japan News TV on his cell phone.
After an hour had elapsed it seemed we were not
going north after all. My GPS unit indicated we were heading for Tokyo by
little roads. Roads in fact no wider than the van in places. And a
traffic light planted roughly every five van-lengths was taking its toll on the
brake pads. But the journey was not without interest. Little houses
and apartments each with remarkably manicured poodle trees and stumps of trees
artistically placed to look like ancient deserts, and pebbles, all within tiny
gardens. Most of the houses well built to architectural perfection, but
some had lean to's and add-ons. A few looked like medieval Kurasawa movie
sets.
Occasionally we stopped in a traffic jam only to
find that it was a line of cars outside a distant gas station. There was an
acute gas shortage in Tokyo because
all the refineries had been shut down for safety checks. Some were still
on fire. Overtaking the long lines for gas, my intrepid driver again chose to ignore the 'let's all
drive on the left' concept that other cars seem to be following.
After three hours the sky had darkened and jet lag
set in. As I nodded off, my
man jammed on the breaks, leapt out of the car at a traffic light and purchased
a can of cold coffee from a vending machine placed perfectly for such sudden
sallies from driver's seats. "Dlink Logel, you sreepy?" Yes ,
thanks, why not?
I guessed, we should have been in Tokyo two hours
ago, but the earthquake had clogged up the main highway perhaps. It was
four hours when we finally started circling between the tall buildings of
downtown Tokyo. Circle we did. I counted about six times we passed
a prominent building advertizing Sony products. The problem was that his
GPS unit had the wrong scale set on it, and the lady inside it was telling my
mountaineer to turn left, again and again.
We suddenly lurched into a tiny alley to reprogram
the lady inside the GPS unit. Mission accomplished we backed out into the oncoming traffic and
whizzed across the central reservation with a rending of metal and paint. No
problem. Not too much traffic, pretty dark, no one listening. A couple
more left turns and there we were. The hotel.
The crew
Remarkably the film crew gushed across the
road to rescue me. "What happened" they cried. "We saw you pass
the hotel 6 times. Come and eat some radioactive sushi. What would
you like to drink? " A good time was had by all as we listened to
our director, Simon Ludgate unfold his shooting schedule. "Lets play
it by ear ", he said. Everyone nodded approvingly. Noting the
duration of the flight (18 hours) and the 4 hour duration of the circular tour
of downtown Tokyo in the dark, they all suggested I checked in and meet them
again for breakfast.
I chose the 14th floor rather than the 3rd floor
because being a seismologist, I wanted to really experience large aftershocks
at first hand. Only the following day did I realize there was no 13th floor so
I guess the 13th floor had been labeled 14. I slept through two M=5.5
events but awoke with delight to a Mw6.2 about 80 km away. Like thunder
and lightning, if you count the time between the first jolt and the rolling
surface waves you can gauge the distance quite well.
During the 2 am aftershock, the building heaved
mightily and erratically at first, and then in the next ten seconds
settled to a long swaying motion with gentle creaks of approval from the
furniture. There was that uneasy feeling in the middle about whether it
was going to get bigger. But no, it stopped eventually. Pretty
lame sort of event in fact - no sirens, no screaming from nearby rooms. I
found out later I was the sole occupant of the 13/14th floor. But I left
the seismometer on the Iphone running all night just in case another M6
happened.
Disneyland shaken. A replica of the Queen Mary parked near a
replica of Mt Fuji. White stains in the foreground and distant car park indicate
sand venting in the earthquake.
16 March: Views from a chopper
The next day I found the battery on my Iphone flat having forgotten to
plug it in. Time for breakfast. Two of the elevator shafts had been
switched off to save power. Much of Japan was undergoing rolling power
outages due to nuclear power station closures. I vaguely thought of
walking down the 13/14 flights, but realized it was getting late for the
shooting schedule. Breakfast was a series of alternative dishes. Quite
healthy every one of them but more like supper than breakfast. Several
isolated businessmen sat facing away from each other in ties and suits munching
with poised chopsticks. I chose some toast and grabbed some coffee before
joining the team. But they were busy. The scraped van but with a
different driver was being loaded and ready for off. We were heading for
a helicopter pad for a flight to see damage around Tokyo and along the east
coast. The heliport was near Tokyo Disneyland.
Quite close to a replica of the Queen Mary and a
replica of mount Fuji and other fantasies we found the heliport, a
warehouse full of partly dismantled helicopters. Our director sensibly
chose one that was fully assembled, and as it was rolled onto the tarmac, we
all went off to get weighed. Dead weight determines the range for a given
amount of fuel in a helicopter, and the idea was to go as far as we could and
then return to the same spot. Too much weight and you never
return. A petite and
dapper-looking nice young lady helped us on and off the scales. After some minor arithmetic, we decided
there was indeed too much weight so we left one of our crew behind, our fixer Luisella Palladino, in favor of getting as far away from Tokyo as we
could.
As it happened this was to be an exciting place to leave Luisella, since an
aftershock occurred very close to the heliport while we were up in the
air. But I am getting ahead of the story.
Shedding all but the necessary cameras, GPS units
and sound recording stuff we clambered aboard. The very petite and dapper-looking young lady turned out to
be the pilot. She warned me
not to fiddle with her controls once we had left the ground, waving in the
general direction of a couple of dozen knobs and levers dangerously close to my
seat. She then told me that I needed to shout into the little furry mouse thing
clamped to the headphones if I wanted to tell her something. The little furry thing wanted to sit in
front of my nose. "No good.
You need it here", she said shoving it into my mouth.
So off we went. Not too bad really.
Disneyland from the air looked a mess. Teh artificial Mt Fuji was OK and so was the Queen Mary. But the parking lots were devoid of
cars and a muddy mess. They had a bunch of cracks everywhere through which sand
had vented in the form of mud volcanoes far more spectacular that the Mt. Fuji
replica. The mud volcanoes are caused by the eruption of sand and water caused
by very slow but very large (tens of inches) lurching motions of the ground
during the earthquake.
The 634 m high Tokyo
Sky tree survived the earthquake and was originally shceduled for completion in
Dec 2011.
As we climbed the enormity of a 30 million strong
metropolis revealed itself. Even
at a couple of thousand feet the city limits were invisible in every
direction. A couple of black palls
of smoke in the distance indicated still burning fires from the earthquake. We
swung by the Tokyo TV tower, the
tallest building in Japan, and made a bee-line for the nearest fire. No signs of damage to the city,
remarkable since it had sunk uniformly 10 cm during the earthquake, in addition
to be shaken by a M=9 earthquake and a bunch of sixes and sevens for the past
week. Whizzo engineering - bravo
to the earthquake engineers.
The numerous refineries and other industrial plant
around the city looked in pretty good shape, but it was not surprising that
some damage had been sustained.
Problems arise from liquefaction near the shores. When you build on mud, you must expect
it to turn to jelly in an earthquake, so the remedy is to drive piles driven
everywhere. Injected concrete,
helical piles, steel poles- almost anything will do, and the deeper and the
more them, the better. All the
buildings were propped upon these underground stilts, but the pipes between had
moved and it only takes a couple of fractured gas pipes and a spark to cause a
conflagration. That is what had
happened to an LPG site near the harbor over which we were now flying.
Fire engines sprayed water on the flames and
smoke. It was difficult to see
what was going on, because there was more smoke than flames, but presumably the
fire was under control. A good
thing, given the thousands of tons of inflammable liquids sloshing around in
tanks nearby. I glanced out our
pilot - could I ask her to go closer?
Probably not - helicopters blow a lot of air around, and I suppose an
explosion beneath us might be considered undesirable. I learned later that helicopters are not allowed within a
thousand feet of disasters, unless they want to become part of them, largely
because the throbbing is distracting for those already in distress on the
ground.
Coastal Damage
Distress
was indeed appearing below. The
helicopter had moved west across fields and villages, leaving the suburbs of
Tokyo behind. My GPS unit told me
we were moving at 180 km/hr but it sure didn't feel very fast. The Pacific coast loomed ahead.
It
looked quite normal until you looked more closely. The sea looked like sea- waves and white caps and surf - but
there were oddities on land. Firstly the rivers all had gates across them.
These giant locks looked like match-sticks from the air. During tsunami the gates automatically
close, to keep the water from driving headlong backwards up the rivers. The tsunami here was only a few meters
high so the system seemed to have worked.
Bravo to the engineers again.
Tsunami
gates at mouth of a small river
Although
there were many buildings along the coast, here in the south they all seemed
intact. Good engineering
again. As we flew northward along
the beach, which had no tsunami wall,
a warehouse occasionally sagged sideways where a corner had been bashed
in by the tsunami a few days earlier.
Further along the coast we
encountered a harbor. Again all
looked normal from the air. Boats
parked around the dock, a few boats on the dock. Wait a moment - boats on the dock?
The helicopter circled around. Yes
sure enough boats were parked like dead fish at all sorts of unexpected angles
on the shoreline and across the breakwater. Some muzzled stern to prow - others decidedly ruinous, pointing skyward. Obviously the tsunami here had crossed
the breakwater, flooded the harbor and then moved inland a few hundred yards,
scattering boats here and there as it ran out of steam. Distressingly some boats had sunk in
the harbor, and who knows how many had been sucked out to sea over the
breakwater. Only the big ones with
their larger drafts had been stranded upon it.
At
this moment , unknown to us, a 6.2
aftershock directly beneath the harbor, was shaking the rescue crews on the
ground working near in the harbor buildings. The aftershock was about 15 miles underground so its major shaking
effects were spread over an area at least 30 miles in radius. Though about the same energy of the
Christchurch M6 earthquake that had all but destroyed that beautiful city
earlier this year, the aftershock was simply a noisy distraction to the survivors
on the ground. Probably less of
a distraction than the throb of the chopper blades as we sailed past.
We
headed further north. A cliff
loomed ahead with a wide flat-topped plateau that had obviously been planed that way by the sea, while it was an offshore island in the geological past. This week's uplift raised it another 30
cm. Not very much, but a small increment in the geological
uplift that had formed the plateau over the past million years or so. An earthquake like this week's event once every 1000 years would do it easily.
The
plateau was covered with a sprinkling of wind generators. There is little doubt that Japan will be thinking
of more of these in the coming months.
Nuclear power is all very well but
multiple near-meltdowns 100 miles to our north are going to result in some retinking on the wisdom of putting so much complicated electrical stuff on the
shoreline, ready for immersion in 10 m of sea water. Nuclear power plants simply donŐt work well if you drop them
in a swimming pool.
The
problem with wind, of course is that sometimes it just doesn't blow. How many of us are willing to watch the
telly only when the wind blows?
And that seemed to be the story today. The giant impellors were pointing hopefully in random
directions waiting for a puff to justify their existence.
For
much of last week the wind had been fortunately blowing offshore. Fortunately, that is, for people allergic to radioactivity. Not so good for the fish, or for the
rest of the world downwind. We could see a squall coming behind us and our
helicopter driver, indicated as such with a few precise commands into her
microphone.
We
were halfway to the power stations when she decided to head back. The gas needle pointed at half mast and
the sunny scene to our north was now replaced by big black clouds and distant
downpours to our south. She picked
up speed and the chopper started vibrating in protest. Apparently helicopter pilots donŐt like
rain and lightning.
We
crossed the peninsula and hurtled low across the sea toward the heliport amid a
flurry of light rain. The whitecaps
on the sea indicated Beaufort Scale 5 or 6 - a stiff breeze. The Queen Mary replica looked bravely
on. The headphones crackled and our pilot translated. "Heliport shaken by aftershock. They are checking out
the tarmac for safety." We
hovered a bit short of landing and settled like a large wind-blown locus on a
few cracks that had been brushed clean of sand vented from them. The shaking had been mild, but we could
see that during the M=9.0 earthquake earlier that week the liquefaction cracks
had vented a couple of hundred pounds of sand and mud. I walked over gesticulating here and
there, sinking in my excitement deep into the still wet mud volcano. The film crew focused on cracks.
Heading back to the hotel we realized there were many of these vents in the
cracked roadways. The sidewalks and curbs in places were at ridiculous
angles. Pedestrians would surely
need to tread warily through the mess of mud and fissures. In fact there were probably more
pedestrians than cars - surely a first for Tokyo? The gas shortage was keeping them at home. It was also keeping the refinery
workers at home. No refinery
workers meant no gasoline. The
trains were running patchily due to the power outages.
Gaia. A run on bicycles. Empty streets in
Tokyo. No long lines at the sushi
bars.
A
visit to some nearby stores revealed that there had been a run on bicycles, gas
masks, iodine pills, and all sorts of useful things like sticky tape, to seal the
anticipated radioactive cloud from leaking into apartments and houses. The hotel had run out of frivolous
food like desert, and many smaller stores remained closed. The restaurants were empty of
customers. On some streets football-field-sized TV screens showed helicopters sprinkling water onto
radiactive cores north of the capital. But no one was watching, the streets were empty, and the people presumably inside their sticky-taped doors.