Earthquake Diary 97

 Across the river from my condo, there is an area containing small apartment buildings. Many of these were damaged, as was this building that lost part of the siding.

 Again, on the other side of the river, farming goes on whether or not we have disasters. Of course, the farm land along the coast will take three to five or more years to become productive again, according to local farmers speaking on TV,

 Here ia another building that lost siding. Buildings like this still hace people living in them and they are gradually being repaired.

 Here the air conditioning unit has broken away from the wall. In this regard,the government is starting a campaign to reduce the use of air conditioning during the coming summer. The government is planning to reduce energy consumption by 15% to 20% permanently, and reducing the amount of energy used for temperature control will help the effort.

 When this wall was built, we wondered what it was going to be. The underground portion is larger than the part you can see. There were rumors at the time that the city was going to construct another bridge in this area and the foundation of this wall was so big we thought that it might be part of the rumored bridge. However, it turned out to be simply a retaining wall for this building. The interesting thing is that it received no damage whatsoever during the earthquakes.

This is a map from our local newspaper, the Kahoku Shinpo. It shows the primary quake, label M 9.0 and the four major aftershocks, labeled M 7.something. The numbers along the coastline are the heights of the tsunami at that location.