Earthquake Diary 38

 This is the station building at Izumi Chuo. My art lessons are held on the top floor just under the pole that sticks up from the roof. However, I have received an email saying that the building is so badly damaged that no one is allowed into it and that classes are suspended until they know what is going to happen with the building - repair? rebuild? just leave it empty? The members of my class are going to get together in April and decide what to do. Hopefully, we can find a place where we can meet and pay the teacher directly until the culture center reopens.

 When walking home from Izumi Chuo, I usually take Suisen Dori (Daffodil Road), a pedestrians only wide path that goes about a third of the way to my home. However, to get to it, you have to cross a pedestrian bridge over one of the main roads. As I showed before, this bridge received a lot of damage, although it was still passable. Today I found that some temporary repair work had been done. In this picture the metal cover for the space between the bridge and the approach had been replaced and taped down.

 Here they had just blocked of the damaged area and put asphalt over a large crack.

 The approach dropped (or the bridge rose) about 10 centimeters, leaving a very easy to trip over step. This had been covered with asphalt to make it less dangerous.

 One of the first buildings on Suisen Dori is a health club. On this day they had opened the bath to the public, with members having priority. Since there is no gas at all and many places are still without water, this is a very great public service.

 This is a new medical clinic that has reopened. One of the problems that people are having is that their prescription medicines are running out and the hospitals and clinics are mostly still closed.

 You probably can not see it in the picture unless you enlarge it, but there is a single yellow rope stretched around the building with a sign on it (on the right side of the vertical white sign with red lettering). The sign says that the building can not be entered because it is unsafe.

This is structural material that fell of the local 77 Bank. They apparently just dumped it in this are to get it out of the way, so that they could reopen.