Earthquake Diary 48

 Continuing my walk around the subway line between Yaotome and Dainohara, I was this building. The blue area on the second floor is a plastic tarp that appears to be covering broken windows.

 I was very surprised to find that his steep embankment had not fallen. Although thinking about it, I remember that it is only a couple of year old so it should have been okay.

 This is another view of the same place.

 The subway line outside of the stations seemed to be okay, not damage at all.

 I was also surprised to find that someone, in the midst of this disaster, had plowed the rice paddies in preparation for a new crop.

 I have walked to this pond before, but I had always gone to the left and walked through the little park that is there. On this day I decided to see what was on the right where the path goes under the subway tracks..

 There was not damage to the supports. All of the damage must have been within or next to the stations.

Once I had passed under the tracks, I found a flight of stairs going up the side of a steep hill. Since there was no other way to go, other than back, I started up.

Saturday, April 2
Things are gradually settling down to a new routine, similar but different from the routine before the quake. Today I am staying home. I plan to get the email working on my netbook that is running on Linux. Therefore, today I will just write some short comments about the state of things.

Today's newspaper said that 11% of the rice paddies in Miyagi Prefecture have been flood with salt water and are currently useless. It also said that it will take three to five years to get them back to normal.

Still no gas. According to the newspaper, the workmen are getting closer but they are still in the outlying areas. The plan is to work from the outside in and my apartment is in. We have changed from using electric pans, to a one burner cartridge-operated gas stove.

I found out why yogurt is hard to get. Most of the big yogurt producing companies are in the Tokyo area and they are having daily blackouts. Yogurt production requires precise temperatures so it can not be made when the electricity goes off in the middle.

The big sports news here is that 23 three of the sumo wrestlers have now been forced to resign because of the match fixing scandal. It is said that some of the mid level wrestlers have been make huge amounts of money by agreeing to lose.

The aftershocks keep coming but they are getting weaker and they tend to be confined to the two ends of the active area. This means that they are to the north or south of us and we do not get shaken too much.