The eve of destruction

Sometimes you find yourself an unwitting spectator to unfolding events so fantastic that even as you’re watching them, you still have trouble grasping just exactly what it is you are a witness to. That’s the way I felt as I was channel surfing at around 2 in the morning on Fri. and stopped on CNN to see that this venerable news station was covering what it called a major earthquake that had just struck off the northern coast of Japan.

The quake, said to have registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, had just hit and we were viewing live shots of areas close to the epicenter. Eventually we saw from a distance what appeared to be a freeway bridge, an underpass, and to the left of the underpass, what looked to be a parking lot that was full of water and there were floating vehicles everywhere. 
The CNN anchor even wondered why there were all those vehicles floating around.  In the meantime, traffic on the overpass bridge was turning around and heading back in the direction from which it’d come. In fact, at least two cars were on the road beneath the overpass, where they drove through and disappeared.

It didn’t seem like it was all that much later, but suddenly we were seeing a second tsunami wave washing along that same area. This time there were large boats, more vehicles, and all sorts of debris being pushed through the underpass that had had traffic on it only minutes before.

After that, everything got surreal. Suddenly you started seeing waves filled with all sorts of debris. They washed over what looked like farm land, then through housing complexes, and over highways that had traffic on them right up to the time that the waves hit them. Traffic seemed to give way to the tsunami, but beyond on roads that the tsunami had not yet reached was more traffic seemingly unaware of what was rushing towards them.

Before too long, the quake was upgraded to an incredible 8.9. One expert explained that meant that the quake was a thousand times stronger than initially thought. It has since been upgraded again, to a number almost unheard of, a staggering 9.0. This number is likely to be upgraded again as time goes on.

The number of victims is also going to go up. By Mon. evening, the official count was over 6000, but there were whole towns that were razed, and it’s unknown how many victims are still uncounted. On MSN’s website, there are 21 aerial photos that show the amount of damage done in interactive before and after pictures. From these, it’s possible to see how much was just washed away to sea.

And that is only the beginning. In what looks like Chernobyl on steroids, there are at least three nuclear reactors heavily damaged when their cooling systems failed, causing at least a partial meltdown in one.

One estimate on the amount of damage done was set at around $180 billion. Yes, this is a very preliminary figure, but if the scale of damage, said by some in Japan as the most extensive since WW2, is any indication, this figure, like the size of the earthquake, will likely have to be upgraded to a far higher figure.