Earthquake & Tsunami Aftermath On A Monday in Japan

Kimitsu-shi, Chiba-ken, Japan. - It's Monday, and a lot of people wonder if I need to get to work on this day after the disaster last Friday that killed more than a thousand people. Yes, I did get to work, everyone at site did, although I heard that there are offices in Tokyo that are closed today.

Today is Blackout day, a scheduled one. Due to the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the nuclear plants in Fukushima, Japan is now suffering from power shortages. As such, people in Japan have to share the usage of electrical power and will each experience a three hours power outage. When I login to my Facebook account just now, I saw this message:

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"Japan Earthquake Information - Updated Mar 14, 8:05AM

Scheduled Blackout
There will be a scheduled blackout (power outage) starting the morning of 3/14 in Tokyo, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma, Chiba, Kanagawa, Saitama, Yamanashi, and Shizuoka.
Areas will be divided into 5 groups and each group will experience about 3 hours of power outage.

Please refer to the TEPCO Homepage (as of now, the list is only provided in Japanese) to find out which group you are in and what time the power outage will occur in your group.

Train companies have announced that there will be irregular operation, including out of service hours. Summary here.

JR | Tokyo Metro | Toei Subway/Bus | Tokyu | Odakyu | Keio | Tobu | Keikyu | Keisei

Major out of services are: Tokaido Line (all day), Yokosuka Line (all day), Yokohama Line (all day), Odakyu will only operate between Kyodo to Shinjyuku (all day), Keio will only operate between Chofu and Shinjyuku (during morning and evening rush hours).

The Facebook website will not be affected by this blackout.

About this box: Facebook uses this box to provide information to foreigners and visitors in Japan for the duration of the current crisis."

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I am not sure if everyone gets this message or it is only for people who login through an IP address from Japan, but I think this is very useful at this difficult time in Japan. Kudos to Facebook!! If you think this information might be useful to your friends, just hit the Recommend button above or below this article to post it to your Facebook wall.

As described in my earlier posting about the earthquake on March 11, I am a field engineer who is currently working on an outage in a TEPCO thermal power plant in Chiba. When I get to site today and visited the TEPCO office, I was shocked to realize the absence of light in the office. It was dark and I thought the office must be under-going some electrical panel maintenance work until I was told that they are actually trying to reduce electrical power usage so that more people in other parts of Japan can have a share of the power. Only laptops and computers were powered in their office. Although I know that this measure will only reduce a minimum amount of energy consumption, these people have immediately won my utmost respect to them. I went back to our office and we started switching off our lights too.

March 11, Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan

Kimitsu-shi, Chiba-ken, Japan - It has been more than 24 hours since the 8.9 scale earthquake struck North-Eastern part of Japan, causing tsunami of 10 meters that destroyed homes and killed believed to be more than a thousand people. It was indeed a very sad day in Japan - March 11, 2011.

This will be one of my very rare post that will have no picture in it. I want to share my experience in this earthquake.

It was a Friday evening, at 2.46pm Japan Local Time. I was working at a Thermal Power Plant in Futtsu, Japan. At that time, I was just done with checking my email in the site office and was getting ready to go to the turbine deck to checkout some instrumentation before attending a daily meeting at 3.30pm. Just when I was getting ready, the office floor suddenly moved sideways and the movement got stronger and stronger. We immediately ran down the office building to an open space carpark just by the office. We couldn't stand still on our feet. The earth was moving sideways (left right front back) and we had to move our legs to keep our balance. The cars parked at the parking area were shaking too. It lasted for more than 3 minutes, and instantly we knew that this is a big one, a special one, unlike the ones we had in Japan that will usually only last for a few seconds.

People who were working at site in the turbine building stopped work and evacuated the area. Everyone was instructed to return to their office and was prohibited from entering the turbine building. It was about 30 minutes later that we felt the second quake, which I think was stronger than the first one as I could hear the items on the table trembling when I was on my way running out of the office, for the second time. The Japanese colleagues were all putting on their safety helmet in the second evacuation from the office. All of them were seen using their mobile phones to watch the TV news.