Japan Tsunami Floods Kitakami – Satellite Images
Posted by feww on March 17, 2011
Deadly Tsunami Spawned by Japan Megaquake Floods Kitakami River Basin
Click image to enlarge. Download larger image (3 MB, JPEG) — acquired March 14, 201
Click image to enlarge. Download larger image (4 MB, JPEG) acquired January 16, 2011
The magnitude 9.0 megaquake that struck northeastern Honshu, Japan on March 11, 2011, spawned a deadly tsunami which inundated vast coastal areas along the eastern seaboard of the country’s main island. Top image shows flooded croplands and settlements along the Kitakami River, which was taken by ASTER on NASA’s Terra satellite on March 14, 2011. The bottom image posted for comparison was taken two months earlier. Source: NASA-EO.
Megaquake and Tsunami, Nuclear Power Plant Crisis -UPDATE (17 March 2011, at 05:00 UTC)
The confirmed death toll from Friday’s 9.0Mw megaquake and tsunami has climbed to 5,178, police said. At least 8,606 people are still missing.
The US state department has advised the US citizens living within 80km of Fukushima Daiichi NPP to leave the area. Japanese government’s exclusion zone is 20km, with a 20-30km caution zone.
Intelligent People and Nuclear Power Plants
The governor of Fukushima prefecture, where the doomed nuclear plant is located, has complained that the NPP evacuees lack basic necessities, including sufficient hot food, warm clothes and water, reports say.
As of Sunday March 13, about 230,000 people had been evacuated from the vicinity of the badly damaged nuclear plants, according to a government report.
More Serious Than Reported
TheUS Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, Greg Jaczko, has told a congressional energy and commerce subcommittee hearing in Washington that problems with attempts to cool the troubled reactors are more serious than reported.
“We believe that around the reactor site there are high levels of radiation.”
“[It’s] very difficult for emergency workers to get near the reactors. The doses they could experience would potentially be lethal doses in a very short period of time” he told the US lawmakers.
Three Mile Island
Meanwhile, the US Energy Secretary said the situation seemed to be more serious than the 1979 partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island NNP in Pennsylvania.
According to nuke scientists in France, the Three Mile Island partial meltdown was a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, with the Chernobyl core meltdown scoring 7, and the Fukushima NPP crisis so far rating 6 in severity.
Fire Earth 
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