Mar 19, 2011

Earthquake Diary 10

 I should point out that at the time I took these pictures I did not know about the damage on the coastline nor the extent of the tsunami. This is a planter in the garden that parallels the sidewalk behind our building that leads to the riverside.
 This is the area under my balcony. You can see the crack in the ground which I posted previously. The ground has fallen substantially. The dark area at the base of the foundation used to be underground. The difference is more than 10 cm.
 This picture shows how even the sidewalk has separated from the surrounding dirt and sunk a bit.
 A little further on I found that the concrete-slab sidewalk had sunk about 3 or 4 centimeters.
 This is a closer view of the foundation of our building, right under my apartment. Again the dark area used to be underground. It looks like our building floated on top of the dirt. I guess this is not surprising. If you put a mixture of various sized rocks in a box and shake them, the smallest ones will end up at the bottom and the largest will be at the top. It appears that that is what happened to our building, it floated to the top during the shaking.
 This is the main entrance to our building.
 This is just to the left of the previous picture. Again the relative altitudes of things has changed.
The weather turned bad for a while and it started to snow. This is the view from one of my balconies.

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