People in Waikiki are being evacuated because of the expected tsunami from Japan. The airport is closed. And my friend in Hawaii is calmly emailing me over some abstruse WordPress embedding code.
I’ve tried the gigya shortcode in about every configuration I can come up with and I can get the player, but not the video itself. Their embed code is strange compared to others. Have you tried vodpod?
Panos is the undisputed gigya guru, so you might post in the forums. I don’t see a contact form on his blog.
Funny they had warning sirens at 8pm here, but I did not hear them. I did hear the ones about 9:20pm though.
I felt “compelled” to go grocery shopping this afternoon. I could have waited a few more days, but it was a strong urging. Glad I did now.
And we just had a 4.5 earthquake followed shortly after by a 3.3.
Fasten your seatbelts.
Aloha
TO which my response is an understandable:
You mean you JUST had one? Just now?
And the calm reply:
Yup, just a few minutes before I sent the previous emails, we had two earthquakes.
Aloha
And my un-calm reply:
Jesus Christ GET OFF THE INTERNET! Step away from power sources, dude! Priorities! You have to live long enough to have me over for merlot!
Although now I need a Martini!
UPDATE: oh wait, there’s more!
I’m up on the hill and safe. I’m off grid on solar and we had a bright sunny day so I have plenty of juice. My hand crank/solar radio is right here tuned to a radio station that plays a song and then does an update, then plays another song, then another update.
Wave heights for Kona, down the hill from me, are expected at a meter high, but they could be 5 to 15 minutes in length so they could push a good ways inland…
Ten earthquakes in the last hour +/-. Most 1 to 2.
When Kilauea was cranked up earlier this week we were getting 25 or so per day. Most barely felt where I am.
Aloha
Yeah. Make that Martini a double. How am I supposed to sleep when my friends are calmly prepared for the Apocalypse. I bet he could take the Four Horsemen single-handed, and recycle the evidence.
Additionally: stuck in Twitter jail because I’ve tweeted too much this past hour about the Japanese quake and tsunami. Thanks, impersonal, automated ceiling on server loads.
Seriously, has anyone seen a woman answering to “Whore of Babylon?” BE PREPARED.
While official reports only list one five32 deaths at the moment, as you can see the toll from today’s earthquake and tsunami is bound to be a great deal higher, sadly. Estimates are in the thousands, but with widespread power outages, information is sketchy. Phone and SMS service are intermittent in many areas, and there are blackouts in a wide area.
Japan Earthquake Tokyo Fires
I will be updating this post as long as I’m awake, so try refreshing every fifteen minutes or so. I’ll be up another hour I guess. Sorry, done for the night. There are resource links in the post for updates.
Japanese 7.9 Earthquake epicenter
Twenty minutes ago Japan, still recovering from yesterday’s 7.2 quake, was hit with another: this one a 7.9 UPDATE 8.8 8.9 fully large enough to be called The Big One, on the Richter scale, severe by any measure. There is a warning along the coast for 10-foot metre tsunami waves, but as the epicenter was east of the landmass, the affected regions should be highly localized, unlike the tsunami in Thailand a few years ago. As you can see from the map below, the next landmass to the east is Canada. UPDATE: there are two tsunami waves, and one was measured at 33 feet.
Japanese Earthquake world map
Honshu is Japan’s larges island, directly west of the epicenter: as you can see from the map above, there have been 38 registered quakes in the immediate region in the last 24 hours. The two large red squares are yesterday’s 7.2 and today’s 7.9, and the red line is a fault line. Today’s quake did damage in Tokyo, halfway down the island, while the earthquake was towards the northern tip
Sandra Barron has uploaded a picture of her kitchen after the quake:
Japanese Earthquake kitchen
And two more moving updates:
and
Now THAT is thinking ahead.
And, finally, a report from the somewhat-mainstream media:
Here is footage of a family evacuating their home in Sendai, showing how hard it hit them. What’s most astonishing to me is how incredibly long it lasts, as well as how quickly they get out of the house. But why are they the only ones outside?
The tsunami has hit, and it is serious. Buildings in Iwate-ken have been swept out to sea. The Philippines has been put on tsunami alert. Predicted zones of affect: Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, Chiba, Ibaraki.
Planes have been grounded and trains stopped across Northern Japan.
There are fires in Chiba, Tokyo and Yokohama.
The epicenter was only 10km off Miyagi
There have been landslides which have buried some people in the northern regions.
At times like these, a good reporter with the instincts of a great editor makes all the difference.
Steve Herman
@W7VOA ÜT: 37.562444,126.975594
Voice of America (VOA) Bureau Chief/Correspondent, based in Seoul, mainly covering NE Asia (Korean peninsula & Japan).
Here is video of the tsunami and consequent landslides.
and a map showing expected arrival times of the tsunami. Remember, the farther from the epicenter, the less intense the wave is likely to be. Current swells are reported at 3/4 meter, implying a 10 foot wave in Hawaii, although that remains to be seen. Hotel visitors in Waikiki are being told to move to the 5th or higher floor and wait for instructions. The west coast of North America is on tsunami alert, but that doesn’t mean it WILL hit (the last one was three inches!) just that we should be wary.
Japan Earthquake tsunami travel times
And here is absolutely unbelievable footage of a huge whirlpool that formed in the port of Uzumaki about two hours after the quake. If you look closely, you can see that there is a boat caught in there, absolutely unable to escape. I can only hope there are no people on board.
And if you’ve been Following me on Twitter (and I appreciate it) know that I didn’t go dark voluntarily. Twitter put me in Twitter Jail for tweeting too many times. I may not be able to get back on tonight, and besides, my laptop is literally overheating, I’ve got five livestream tabs open, two youtubes, so much going on. And my brain is just about as fried.
David Davis possesses only one name, really, and really only half a haircut, since halfway through it he decided to pick up some scissors and stab a passerby in the back. Then, instead of settling down and letting the barber finish, he ran out without so much as tipping. WHAT kind of kids are we raising nowadays?
Well, that’s when the police were tipped off that there was a human before-and-after picture running around the neighborhood, and that they should pick him up.
David Davis, of Cedar Hill Avenue, New Haven, was arrested shortly after the incident when Stamford patrol officers and a police dog found him in a nearby Henry Street apartment. Officers took him into custody when they initially found he was wanted on a warrant for failing to appear in court and later charged him in the stabbing after an investigation, Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said.
We are, of course, far more concerned with the crime against aesthetics than that against the unnamed stabbing victim. But enough of what we think: what do you think?
Do you ever feel like this? I always feel like this. Realizations such as this are the circumstances which led to the invention of the expression “FML.”
Gossip linkies over the jump, just because I’m tired of seeing them all on the front page, plus I don’t want Our Overlords of Teh Googlewebz to get angry with me.
raincoaster 