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Earth Japan

Japan Plans For 100ft Tsunami (thesun.ie) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the preventative-measures dept.
schwit1 shares a report from The Times: It will shake houses and tall buildings, and unleash a 100ft tsunami on one of the most densely populated and industrialized coastlines in the world. It could kill and injure close to a million people. It will almost certainly come in the next few decades. Now, the Japanese government is making plans to evacuate millions of people in anticipation of what could be one of the worst natural disasters in history (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). It is known as the Nankai Trough megaquake. The Japanese government has previously estimated that there is a 70 to 80 percent chance that such an event will take place in the next 30 years and that the earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, could kill 323,000 people and injure 623,000. Unfortunately, the report doesn't outline how the government plans to get people out of harm's way. The city with the most people in the danger zone is Nagoya, Japan's fourth largest city and home to 2.3 million people. "The home of the nation's industry Hamamatsu is also at risk and home to over 800,000 people," reports The Irish Sun.
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Japan Plans For 100ft Tsunami More

Japan Plans For 100ft Tsunami

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  • Trump has the solution (Score:5, Funny)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Thursday December 13, 2018 @10:46PM (#57801620)
    a wall.
  • Please, please adopt the metric system like the rest of the world. :(

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Oh children. Japan used to have their very own Slashdot.

      • This is about this slashdot, of course ; Japanese people don't read this one, and thus don't care about what "ft" is. Duh, have to explain everything...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Feet are metric. One foot is defined as 3048 mm.

      Besides, "Please, please X like the rest of the world." is terrible reasoning. We would have never invented vaccines, electricity, or the internet with that attitude.

    • Please, please adopt the metric system like the rest of the world. :(

      The metric system is boring. English units are full of surprises! I mean, come on - with a joule you know exactly how to calculate it (yawn). BTUs, on the other hand, are a weird mystery involving arcane units and hard-to-remember numbers!

      • Re:Do Japanese citizens even know what a "ft" is? (Score:4, Informative)

        by vtcodger ( 957785 ) on Friday December 14, 2018 @05:15AM (#57802378)

        All four common options for energy -- BTU, Joule, Calorie, Kilocalorie leave something to be desired. The problem is that the Joule and Calorie are too small to be convenient for a lot of real world stuff. Kilocalories would be better except that folks are prone to leave the "kilo" off and they then get confused with calories. (e.g. the "calories" in food are actually kilcalories) Often it's easier to just work with BTUs (roughly a quarter of a kilocalorie) which are a convenient size and aren't ambiguous.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Japanese people aren't generally familiar with feet, yards and other Imperial measures, but they do use some non-metric units.

      Some screen sizes are given in inches, although TVs seem mostly to be centimetres. Things like phones are often in inches. Room sizes are typically give in the number of tatame mats that will fit, although east and west Japan have different size mats. In historical dramas they often talk about "ri", which is a pre-metric unit of measurement.

      But not feet.

    • As cool as the metric system is, one of the advantages of Imperial units is that they're based on intuitive measures. You just have to tell the Japanese person one time, "a foot is about the length of your foot with your shoes on," and they will forever know how long a foot is.

      Unfortunately, going the other way (imperial to metric) is not so intuitive, which is one of the reasons why Americans have thus far resisted the metric system. I was taught the metric system in the 1970s when the U.S. was attemp

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Noting that 1 litre (notice I am spelling it correctly here) is a cube with a 10cm edge. From this follows that a 1 cm cube of water has a mass of 1 gram.

        I would note that size of a persons foot varies far too much to equate it to 12 inches.

        A teaspoon is 5ml, I very much doubt the vast majority of people have the foggiest what power a horse has, and besides what breed? I would note that one atmosphere, is basically equal to one bar, because like 760mm of mercury is so bleeding obvious and 100,000 Pascals is

      • Ah yes, so simple. Until you get to the part where portions of an inch are expressed in fractions. How intuitive is a yard, a mile, or even a furlong?

        The only reason we resist not dumping this archaic system isn't because of a 'foot'. It's because it's impossible to find a metric tape measure.

      • Intuitive my ass. Ok, let asume a foot is length of your foot with your shoes on. How long is a mile then? "Mile" means "thousand", and indeed the original Roman mile was a thousand paces, a pace being around 5 feet. An English mile is... 1760 yards, or 5280 feet. And don't get me started on surface and volume measurements.

    • Look it up, Japan also has its traditional units that are still used in many industries like construction and textiles. They aren't pure metric.

    • Probably.

      It's quite likely they're better educated than the people who aren't bright enough to divide by three when dealing with small numbers of significant digits (y'know like "100 feet" - no they aren't dealing with a 99.5 - 100.49 foot tsunami, and ignoring the possible 100.7 foot tsunami....)

    • Please, please adopt the metric system like the rest of the world. :(

      I know, right?

      Now more than ever (since we now all carry instant pocket conversion computers), we MUST all use the same units! Think of the children!!!

  • Really, that's how people think. "It's a little cheaper [or more convenient or whatever] to live here today, so that's where I'll live." Sure, there's going to be an earthquake [or a flood or a fire or whatever] at some point in the future, but each individual making the decision only knows for sure about the current situation, and the future gets dealt with [or not] when it arrives. It's all a matter of time, eh?

    At first (in time) I thought the first-post joke about a wall and the riposte about #PresidentT

  • I'm just sayin'. Imagine someone riding that mother fucker with a GoPro.
    • The hardest part will be to search the debris to find the go-pro.

    • The video I’ve seen of the tsunamis from 2004 and 2011 seem to indicate that your hypothetical GoPro video would actually be rather boring. It’s not like a giant crested wave suddenly hit the land, for the most part - the water started coming in quietly at first, then just kept inexorably pouring in further and further, gradually increasing in depth and building in strength just due to the sheer volume of water.

      When the volume was at its peak, then it did violently respond to obstacles - like th

      • Wouldn't it depend on where the wave came ashore? I mean they look boring out at sea, but aren't there cases where they get huge and take out massive areas? I'm thinking of the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake in A.D. 1700 in Oregon, for example. Don't you think that had to be a huge ass wave to have smashed that far inland. I don't know man, I'm no geologist, seismologist, or whatever kind of ologist that studies Tsunamis. I don't claim to know, but it seems likely in some situations they'd be massive w
      • Yes, a tsunami looks like the tide coming in, hence the old name "tidal wave".
        Trouble is, it just keeps on coming until everything is under water, and the horizontal speed destroys everything in its path.

    • Knowing Japan; they would build a robot to perform this task.
      Would be cool as fuck for sure.

      • The only thing cooler than suicide-surfing a 100ft Tsunami would be riding in the chest or helmet of a Gundam-style surfing robot... with a 12ft electric katana on it's back.
  • to weather such a storm. Not with their economy being what it is. It's times like this that I wish folks could stop wasting time dropping bombs and fighting over who's God is God and just get stuff done.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Who has Japan been dropping bombs on and on behalf of what god?

  • 1923 Yokohama Earquake killed about 250,000 (Score:5, Informative)

    by BoRegardless ( 721219 ) on Thursday December 13, 2018 @11:32PM (#57801748)

    People seem to have forgotten the 1923 earthquake and FIRE that destroyed Yokohama and a quarter million lives, without even a hint of a tsunami!

    It was around 7am and people getting breakfast off of wood or coal fires in the homes leading up the hill from Yokohama bay. The quake hit, upset all the cooking fires and lit the upper reaches of the hill on fire and the Westerly winds blowing over the top pushed the fire ... and people who survived down toward the bay.

    Unfortunately, the major industrial port's fuel tanks burst covering it with fuel and oil which quickly lit off when the windborn fires reached the bay and very few people survived. The photos taken by local photographers just after the ashes cooled made Yokohama look almost exactly like Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb. I have a two volume set of books summarizing the events.

    Yokohama harbor had about a 9.5 foot elevation change after the earthquake in some areas. This is a similar elevation change to what was detected in the Seattle area after an earthquake in the early 1700s before westerners populated the area. It is predicted to hit again. Good reason Amazon is looking for another location!

    In other words, there are a whole lot of ways to destroy a city in & after an earthquake and then isolate people after the earthquake when the ground elevation changes wipe out roads, bridges, trains, etc.

    • In other words, there are a whole lot of ways to destroy a city in & after an earthquake

      Interesting, but that was 100 years ago. Sendai (big Japanese city) was strongly hit by the earthquake in 2011 and almost no one died from the tremors or fire, most deaths were due to the tsunami that followed (a few minutes later).

      • That is what the Fukashima was all about. Forget about the millions that might drown, focus on the fact that some deadly radiation could escape that kills as many as dozens of people.

  • Retirement cities (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Japan has a big aging population problem. Also a tsunami problem for certain cities. Seems like converting those cities to retirement communities is a solution to both.

  • If the same thing was threatening the coast of NY or Florida or California, I can see crossover between the climate-deniers and the trough-deniers.

    Those crazy scientists! There is no trough! It's a hoax! Don't buy into it people! And even if there is a trough, it's not full of tsunami germs. It hasn't been taking earthquake vitamins. It's not an accident waiting to happen, it's just an irrigation ditch. And even an quake or tsunami could happen, it's Godzilla-related, not nature. Godzilla's been d

    • In California we would probably try to do something about it, and probably fail because we would need federal resources and they would be denied us. In NY they would definitely fail because their city cannot be saved from the rising sea by any reasonable means. It's more or less built on it. Florida wouldn't even try, and that particular sand bar can't wash away quickly enough.

      Speaking of which, Japan is screwed. True nanotechnology won't get here soon enough to let them either dome their island and sink it

      • Florida wouldn't even try, and that particular sand bar can't wash away quickly enough.

        The British Isles would be rendered effectively uninhabitable if it did. The Gulf Stream carries gigajoules of solar energy north every second. Without that sand bar, it shrinks, maybe even stops entirely.

        • The British Isles would be rendered effectively uninhabitable if it did.

          Or if you eliminated foreign foods.

          • The British Isles would be rendered effectively uninhabitable if it did.

            Or if you eliminated foreign foods.

            +1 !

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        In California we would probably try to do something about it, and probably fail because we would need federal resources and they would be denied us.

        I have a plan - Otisburg.

  • Can airlift for a while until settles. if during a typhoon then those survival balls might be better but take up more space. Neither full proof but odds improve.
  • ... we should build a wall ...along the west coast!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      Which does raise the question of how big the tsunami will be when it reaches the west coast of N. America.

      • The interesting way the roughly 1700 Seattle earthquake in Washington State was confirmed was that the sediment dating in the state of Washington corelated that data with the "tsunami without a quake" which arrived in Japan without any warning. The Japanese thoroughly recorded that tsunami.

      • Probably much much smaller than a tsunami caused by the cascadia fault quake [reuters.com] that we are due to experience any time now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Which of course raises the question of how big the tsunami will be when it reaches Japan.
          Luckily I'm 800 ft above sea level, still be weird if the town gets wiped out

  • It's interesting that Japan and California actually plan for major earthquakes whereas planning for a repetition of the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes in SouthEast Missouri seems to be virtually nonexistent.

    • It's interesting that Japan and California actually plan for major earthquakes whereas planning for a repetition of the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes in SouthEast Missouri seems to be virtually nonexistent.

      It isn't. You're just not paying attention. Missouri has been replacing hundreds of highway bridges. The new ones are earthquake resistant. When the I-70 bridge over the Missouri River was replaced, the new one has earthquake resistance features. The adjacent span was retrofitted with some such features. MODOT is definitely paying attention, and taking steps.

      Plenty of older concrete buildings are deadly traps waiting to pancake though.

      • "Plenty of older concrete buildings are deadly traps waiting to pancake though."

        Agree. Those older buildings, and especially 19th and early 20th century unreinforced brick structures are mostly what I had in mind. California banned unreinforced masonry construction in the 1930s after major damage was done to many schools by the Long Beach earthquake. And they retrofitted a lot (not all) of them in the late 20th century. Modern construction is much better earthquake wise, but I don't think anyplace in th

    • The 1811-12 quakes caused damage hundreds of kilometers away, and were felt as far away as the East Coast. But the midwestern U.S. was sparsely populated at the time. A repeat performance would cause devastation across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. The ENTIRE midwest, Southeast, parts of the Atlantic seaboard, and much of southeastern and south central Canada are immensely vulnerable. I'm near Cleveland, over 1000km away, and I don't expect even we will be fully safe, although our building

  • ...nor to I play one on television. So if this sounds stupid please be gentle.

    The past few years there has been a lot of talk about rail guns. Which makes me wonder...

    Line up a bunch of rail guns and fire whatever into the wall of water. Would this destabilize the wave and push for force of it away from the shore? Or at least diminish it's size.

    Kind of like pulling a bottom Jenga and having the pile fall forward. Thus stopping it short of hitting any buildings.

    Hey, if it's stupid and wrong, sorry. Just tryi

  • I live in southern Japan under the threat of the Nanaki trough earthquake.

    > Unfortunately, the report doesn't outline how the government plans to get people out of harm's way.

    My local area is expected to be about 7m under water (roughly 22 feet for you Neanderthals) and there are yearly evacuation drills, tsunami siren tests, tall buildings have agreed to be shelters and a lot of money poured into awareness and prep. Everyone is encouraged to work our their evac plan and meeting points in advanced, and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      My wife's family is in the Nagoya metro area, though luckily they live in a small village on the side of a mountain so the tsunami itself would not be a problem. Unfortunately though all the jobs/schools are on the plain which would be swallowed up.

  • Seems odd that Japan is planning for a tsunami that is such a round number when measured in Imperial units. Are they actually planning for a 30m tsunami?

  • They should encircle the Island with big stone markers at the 100' wave height that say "do not build below this height" so that future generations don't have to retain the knowledge directly.

    Like the ancient ones uphill from the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

  • How much is it in furlong?

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