i’m glad to hear all our dopers in japan are okay.
hokkaido brit, try a sweatsuit at the foot of the futon. easy to grab and throw on in a crisis. no buttons or zips, and you are fully covered wrists to ankles.
interesting earthquakes going on. my office is working on a hospital in new jersey right now, in the past month there has been an earthquake, hurricane, and just this week an f-1 tornado in the area. thankfully the hospital is still standing.
i’m glad to hear all our dopers in japan are okay.
hokkaido brit, try a sweatsuit at the foot of the futon. easy to grab and throw on in a crisis. no buttons or zips, and you are fully covered wrists to ankles.
interesting earthquakes going on. my office is working on a hospital in new jersey right now, in the past month there has been an earthquake, hurricane, and just this week an f-1 tornado in the area. thankfully the hospital is still standing.
An F1 tornado probably isn’t going to do any real damage to a hospital. Feel better? 
I can’t speak for the rest of your (potential) disasters, especially if it isn’t built to withstand earthquakes. 
I never ever ever sleep naked if I’m in a place where an earthquake might hit. (I normally don’t anyway, but on occasion…oh, you know.) I now know why you always hear something on the news about naked folks in the street – I couldn’t get out of my room fast enough after Northridge! Fortunately I was dressed. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put clothes on until somebody had seen me and screamed and ran away…
Yikes. Glad to hear the Dopers in Japan are okay.
Being an East Coaster transplanted to quake central, I have a hard time seeing earthquakes as real. We had a 4.2 here a month or so ago, and it was… disquieting. I really need to quakeproof the house.
Brit, also keep slippers near your bed. Running across broken glass barefoot in the middle of the night is a Bad Idea.
What about the Hokkaido-Mainland Tunnel? I wonder what magnitude of earthquake it was designed to withstand? My vision of horro-being in the middle of that tunnel when the ground shakes…any chance it would flood?
That tunnel is LONG and icky! I took an overnight train back to Hokkaido last year and woke up some time in the middle of the night to find the train STOPPED in the tunnel. EEEEK! I am claustrophobic, and it did my head in. Spent the next few minutes breathing deeply and feeling the sweat trickle into the mattress. Eventually about four years later the train started moving again. Earthquakes and fires were uppermost in my mind.
For the size of the quake, there was relatively little damage. I saw a few houses on the TV which have sunk because the ground liquified, and they tilted a few feet off centre. (wonder how they fix that??) Lots of broken glass. It makes me more determined than ever only to own the very basics, so there is less to smash and be dangerous in such circumstances.
Thanks for the sweatpants and slippers advice. In the winter, no problem! Trouble is it is just getting cold now and I am in the middle of swapping clothes over. There were heaps of washed and as yet unsorted clothes in our bedroom but nothing immediately grabbable. There is now, you may be sure.
My sickest earthquake experience was at the “ostsuya” (wake?) of my husband’s grandmother, only weeks after I married into the family. She had been brought home to lie there one last night before the funeral, when a huge quake started. (I was naked then too, upstairs changing out of black kimono…) I grabbed sweats, flung them on and ran downstairs. The house was full of more or less drunk relatives. The body was ROCKING in the futon, which had slipped off, and the face cloth, too. MIL ran to the body and was holding her still, FIL (it was HIS mother!) ran out of the house to check the foundations. All the young people including me and husband ran out of the house and stood in the driveway watching cars and trees rocking in synch, and all the old ladies sat on the floor where they were, cackling about omens… It was like a very bad horror movie.
Yes, you don’t need emergency earthquake-type supplies if you live where there are no quakes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no fires, no terrorists, and no meteorites coming down through the roof. And the year 2K doesn’t happen. And India and Pakistan don’t nuke each other, so we don’t have to think about the fall-out a few days later.
Hint!
Hint!
Hint!
dang, I was testing different sizes and meant to hit Preview. Well, now I know size 10 is enough, learn by trial and error.
wow! that is one impressive wake, hokkaido brit. grandma’s memory is sure to be eternal after that.