BF2S Forums 9.0 Earthquake in Japan (March 11, 2011)

As many of you may know I work at a Toyota dealership, I woke up this morning to this awful news and have been following it through the day ... we have had constant updates via our intranet all day concerning how this catastrophic event affects Toyota logistics locally and globally.

Last update: Normal production seems to be in order again after some hours of downtime in the areas that have been hit ... forecast deliveries will go as planned with little or no delays!

That last one totally blew me off my chair, in the midst of all this they seek to uphold production ...

Uzique wrote:

makes me think a lot about the state of news-reporting and globalised information, too. it seems like thesedays there's a new atrocity and disaster every day..

The negative effect of which is that we become desensitized quite easily, as well as forget the rest of the disastrous events that preceded the current one that's plastered on every site with cat sized letters (old Finnish proverb). On the other hand, information reaches us directly, and from each and every media there is. Remember the times where you heard it from the radio/saw it in the evening news/read it in the paper next day? Now the information reaches us pretty much immediately and everywhere.

On topic: 7th largest quake recorded in history. I hope the damage is mostly material from this, Japan at least has prepared well. I know several Japanese people through my work, I have no idea what to say to them. Best if I just stay quiet.

there was an earthquake in china yesterday measuring 5.4m, killed 25 people.

Unbelievable photo of actual break in the earth in Japan:

they have a UCL psychology professor on bbc live talking about the japanese's 'emotional restraint and formality', rofl.

i love how news networks compete to try and continually stay relevant with disasters.

yeah what i really want is some tenuous psychological assessment of an entire nation from a guy sat in a TV station in london

enlightening, really.

I have a slight feeling that Alaska is soon to be on the earthquake list...

Mekstizzle wrote:

The media seem to be blowing this out of proportion

you, are an idiot of epic proportions.

yeah mek that was a pretty fucking stupid thing to say. i'm criticising the news 'culture', sure, but the information simply isn't there yet. tokyo looks fine because tokyo is fucking hundreds of miles away from the epicentre-- and it's not as if tokyo is the only populated or urban region in japan, is it? we have an earthquake of the magnitude almost of the boxing day tsunami taking place very close to a massively populated country. japan is heavily engineered and technologised to deal with seismic activity and tsunamis, yes, but this is the biggest they have received since records began. im not sure you can underplay that when smaller events like the kobe disaster killed thousands of people. you have such a macabre and pessimistic worldview, it's almost irritating.

Indeed, the japanese generally know how to deal with earthquakes - that's why so many of their buildings have very strong and flexible foundations, that's also why you don't hear of 10.000 people dying in a quake like what happened in China one or two years ago, but an 8.9 isn't exactly a cakewalk now is it? The richter scale may be a log scale but that is really, really fucking heavy.

To say that the media would be blowing this out of proportion is as ignorant on the subject as you can get.

Its showing waters reaching Santa Monica on 'Al Jezera' now, no huge tides but still boats floating backwards in the marina

Yeah I saw that, a 'pleasure' boat they said almost got lost down it.

They been saying all day how cars and shit look like they are being played with in the bath, and then showed the whirlpool

Shocking wrote:

Yeah, I can't imagine what such a massive quake is like, it looks absolutely unreal.

indeed. There was an earthquake near me last summer, it was a 3.6 and struck like 17 miles away from me. Woke me up, startled me cos I've never felt an earthquake before. An 8.8 must be fucking terrifying.

The words "Nuclear emergency" have the ears ringing for sure right now. Hope Japan pulls through the nuclear reactor problems as well as the tsunami.