The ensuing destruction wreaked by the tsunami that hit coastal areas of Japan on Friday caused by a 9.0 maginitude earthquake puts life in perspective, particularly for those of us obsessed with expensive tech toys. (Photo: CBS News)
Sometimes it takes a disaster for reality orientation and life’s priorities to set in.
This week, at least for those of us reporting in the New Media and other technical publications that cover computers and the consumer electronics industry, all eyes were on Friday, the 11th of March, 2011. The day that the iPad 2 went on sale.
Some of us became completely obsessed with the notion of buying an iPad 2 and wrote about the anticipation and lengths one would go through in order to obtain it.
I include myself in this shameless group — I woke up that Friday morning to find out there was now a 2 or 3 week shipping lag instead of a 2 or 3 day estimated time until I’d receive one if I placed an order with Apple’s web site that day.
Massive lines at the local Apple stores in Northern New Jersey and New York City were forming as early as 9 or 10am, seven hours before they were supposed to go on sale. My chances of getting one on launch day or even in the next week were pretty much shot.
I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to test it out and write up my impressions of it for the following week on ZDNet. I recall I may have even cursed and yelled at my computer screen a few times, feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t one of the selected few technology journalists who had earlier access to the device for review.
That disappointment and my own personal selfishness ended a whole five minutes later, when I received a shower of incoming Twitter messages alerting me to current events in Japan.
I turned on the TV to watch the morning news, where my screen was filled with images of destruction the likes of which we haven’t seen since Christmas of 2004, when an destructive tsunami originating in the Indian Ocean from a massive earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and in other countries within reach of the wave.
Indeed, Hurricane Katrina which followed in our own country in August of 2005 caused untold billions of dollars of damage and displaced the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in New Orleans and all over the Gulf states, but the loss of life, while tragic, paled in comparison to the Indian Ocean tsunami.
We hoped we’d never see anything like those two disasters ever again.
At 2:46PM local time, Friday March 11, when many of us had just gone to bed on the West Coast of the United States, history repeated itself. A massive earthquake, caused by a tectonic megahthrust confirmed by the USGS to be 9.0 on the the moment magnitude scale, struck 81 miles off the coast of Japan’s Tōhoku region.
The resulting tsunami wave created by that earthquake has now caused vast and untold amounts of destruction in the Japanese city of Sendai, and has displaced at least 200,000 people now living in temporary shelters, with a death toll that is already estimated to be in the thousands.
The number of dead will likely rise very sharply over the next several weeks once the full extent of the damage from this event has been completely assessed. Many thousands of people are also reported as missing.
On top of this natural tragedy, the specter of a nuclear disaster has also emerged. Three of Japan’s reactors, located in the prefecture of Fukushima, have been heavily damaged and are leaking radiation.
Three other reactors in the same prefecture are apparently experiencing problems with failed emergency cooling systems.
Eleven of the country’s fifty-five nuclear plants were completely shut down on Friday, leaving many areas without power and working telecommunications infrastructure.
The three severely damaged reactors are located Fukushima #1 (Dai-Ichi) at part of a complex of six reactors, which began construction in 1966 and was opened by Tokyo Electric in 1971.
A second nuclear power plant, Fukushima #2 (Dai-Ni) which is in a nearby a complex of four reactors, is also experiencing problems.
[Next: the possible implications of full or partial meltdowns]»
