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That Terrible Day of the Quake

Discussion in 'Safety valve' started by attar, Aug 11, 2019.

  1. attar

    attar Senior member

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    The Big One in San Francisco.

    Least Gay day.
     
  2. Yashichi

    Yashichi Member

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    I was in the March 11th quake in Japan and I am afraid that one is in my mind as being able to use the adjective "terrible". And you don't need any newspaper front page copy for that because YouTube will supply you with some mighty awful footage of each tsunami that came in. And for me it was an especially weird natural disaster because just about 48 hours before that I woke up seconds before a much smaller shake in that same area and had the weirdest feeling that something was very wrong about the way that shake felt and as I was awake and not too comfortable in the brain I went ahead and logged into my admin section on my site and did a post to my colleague explaining that I thought something was very odd about that shake and I had concerns.

    I was on a train that afternoon when the big one hit and knew immediately what was going on. Very lucky I was on that train, too, because I hadn't found a good place for lunch in the area of downtown Tokyo where I was that morning and about noon -- quite far from my home -- and decided to just head home. Very lucky, because my later need to walk the rest of the way home from the stopped train was only about an hour. All trains were stopped. And my library shelves when I got home were empty. All the books tried to escape, but they couldn't fly too far, so they all crash landed on the floor. And they had no legs, the poor gals and fellas, and so they could not escape by running away. Probably they would have had trouble opening the door, but maybe climbing on top of each other they could have worked that one out, IF they had had legs.

    Actually, there were other things all over the floors of each room, but those empty books shelves sort of stuck in my brain.

    Another thing was watching some of the folks on that train as the three main shakes hit us over about an hour or so, if that time span is properly remembered by my old brain. Of course, the first one was the strongest. But the next two strong ones were a fair bit closer down the coast, in one way to put it.

    One lady on the train really almost went into panic and I had to sort of joke around and help to calm her down.

    A younger lady fooled me because I thought she was calm and just reading her book, when after a bit I realized she hadn't turned a page for a good bit of time and then I sort of snapped her out of her kind of frozen state.

    As they had us exiting the front of the train about an hour and a half after (maybe two hours) they had done a very good emergency stop, I was taking some picture and one of the train employees got mighty angry at me and asked/ordered me to stop that.

    And then it was the aftershocks for the next many, many months that was a fair bit of a problem to get used to. I mean, one can get used to shakes in Japan, but when they are so often and at all times of the day and night it can get on one's nerves.

    I suppose those folks in California back when that one happened also had the same bad experience with so many aftershocks.
     
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  3. ps355528

    ps355528 Active member

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    3-11 was horrific.. I was at work in the regional office in Kesennuma City when we felt the shake.. then about 45 minutes later the sirens sounded again and the instruction "Run for the hills.. Tsunami inbound!

    So like all good workers we ran for our lives.. only stopping to collect some beer and food.. laughing and joking about how it would be yet another false alarm.. small high tide.. the sea walls would protect.

    And we watched in silence as the rain turned to snow the city was swept from the face of the earth.........
     

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