They’re using a shredded newspaper/sawdust compound now to try to seal a leak. I wonder what would have happened if they just left the plants running.
This weekend I attended a film festival held at our local university. OK, i t was a Godzilla film festival, so sue me. Donations received this year were earmarked for disaster relief in Japan.
One of the speakers who comes up each year from Texas is a professor of Asian studies who is a friend of one of the main convention organizers. He was in Tokyo when the earthquake hit, and told us about what he experienced.
One of the most harrowing stories, that thankfully had a happy ending, was of watching the plight of a window washer caught five stories up during the quake. The poor guy was shaken off his platform right away, but was wearing the safety harness, so he had to go through the whole thing dangling all that way above the street. After something like that I don’t think I could ever do that job again.
Mr. Tsutsui also said he could see the buildings in the city skyline sway back and forth, and said the shaking of the bus he was in at the time just seemed to be a mechanical failure until he saw crowds of people running into the street from surrounding buildings. He also remarked on how calm people were afterwards, how disaster preparedness helped folks know what to do.
A coworker in our Japanese office was there during the earthquake. He and his family were able to fly out and back here (Alberta, Canada) a few days later. He worked from here while the office was closed. All the other people who work in the office are from Japan so they just stayed home while the office was closed. He was sent back after two weeks. He left his family in Canada, went back and after just a couple days decided to quit rather than work there.