Typhoon 1919 / Hagibis

thomas said:

half a foot of gungy sludge

Click to expand...

Half a foot?! Holy moly!

It is very hard to believe that I would have myself a serious down moment after the storm has passed, but this one really hits home. And that is for professional reasons, but I'd rather not go too far into why "professional reasons" unless any of you feel a clarification is of import.

This is a serious, serious bummer!

........................................Copy Starts
But a 77-year-old woman in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, died as rescuers of the Tokyo Fire Department, trying to save her by helicopter, dropped her to the ground from an altitude of about 40 meters as they failed to attach a hanger to the harness that she was in, it said.
........................................Copy Ends

That came from this article on the following page for the Mainichi:

There was no typhoon damage in the Suginami Ward area of Tokyo
But when I went to the supermarket to buy eggs, there was almost no groceries.

I noticed on Friday that bread products seemed to be going rapidly and wisely grabbed an excess of what we needed --- might need. I only write "wisely" because yesterday I decided to take a walk around the area to see what the general situation looked like and then ended up going a bit of a distance away once I saw the general local situation wasn't so bad and went into a couple of supermarkets and the bread shelves were empty.

And the only reason I'm making note of this is because yesterday as I was returning to this area and thinking about the bread being all sold out it hit me the last time I saw that was a period of many days after the Friday, March 11th earthquake and tsunami disaster. (Maybe longer than many days --- my memory doesn't work as well as it used to.)

It was kind of weird to have that event come back to me like it did.

I think I'll want to come back to this thinking once I get properly started on a special thread I am considering related to how to be properly prepared for a disaster, like we had in 2011.

And for another sort of update on Hagibis, but a weird update, I'll admit.

You see, Lothor's Jishin is still the only one since it happened:



Seems kind of weird that it would be all by its lonesome like that, unless the Jishin Gods were trying to make a statement of sorts.

By the way, I have no clue why JMA had to do that 2nd post. I don't ever recall seeing that before, unless it was during that first year after 3/11 when everything was shaking so often and things were all sort of in confusion for a number of months right after 3/11.

Anyway, Mr. Lothor, you have yourself in a sort of historic situation with that prediction, of sorts. Of course, this is a sort of small community and most folks around the Net and Japan don't know about your fame.

And I sure did max out the use of the word 'sort' in that post, didn't I? Might be useful for a language class.

いえ、いえ、いえ、とんでもない！Thanks for the kudos but I didn't make a prediction and the last thing I want is fame, I just wanted to alert people that there may be a raised probability. People seem to be pretty level-headed on this board so it seemed a good place to mention a worry that I was carrying around alone (I didn't mention my thoughts to Mrs Lothor). Just checked the JMA site and noticed there have been a few shakes since but there was a gap of almost 48 hours with none reported which, as you say, is unusual. Anyway, thanks for keeping your beady eye on Japanese meteorological phenomena, I sometimes do too but you're the master!

Firstly, that designation of master is probably an excellent Hemingway style of writing, 'cause he used to exaggerate a whole heck of a lot in his actual conversation with folks, but he's forgiven due to what he published.

Secondly, I just took a quick look at the jishin activity since the Lother Jishin and I think I made the Jishin Gods mighty angry 'cause they have been shaking all parts of Japan.

Thirdly, a master would not have missed a target by 8 clics, and that's what I did. That Hagibis took a path about 8km west of Shinagawa Station.



In fact, I think Hagibis passed closer to Hiroyuki Nagashima's residence than that Shinagawa Station.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And on a very sad note: I am really having a hard time digesting that two of the Tokyo Fire Department rescue personnel were negligent with regard to that awful accident with that lady up in Iwaki City. I used to be in aviation, both rotor wing and fixed wing, and I have some serious experience with that exact kind of work and I even have a special commendation for some rescue work during a hurricane in the United States, and I just cannot bring into my old brain any memory of any sort of error by a flight crew such as we are being informed took place up there in Fukushima Prefecture. I'm really, really lost on this one. I just can't digest what happened. I suspect there is a key point we are not being informed of. There had to be something that took those two personnel's focus off of their work, even if it was only something that lasted no more than a couple of seconds. It is the only thing that makes sense. It is no excuse, but it is the only way I can make sense of this whole horrible mess. That huge error puts a whole mess of folks into a very bad light.

Lothor said:

I hope I'm not scaremongering here but I keep remembering that the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake also occurred during a typhoon and I'm concerned that the unusually low atmospheric pressure may have an effect on Tokyo's volatile tectonic plates.

Click to expand...

Yesterday, I found an article suggesting a correlation between storms and earthquakes. Those seismic phenomena are called "stormquakes":



Here's the original publication in the Geophysical Research Letters:

Seismic signals from ocean‐solid Earth interactions are ubiquitously recorded on our planet. However, these wavefields are typically incoherent in the time domain limiting their utilization for understanding ocean dynamics or solid Earth properties. In contrast, we find that during large storms such as hurricanes and Nor'easters the interaction of long‐period ocean waves with shallow seafloor features located near the edge of continental shelves, known as ocean banks, excites coherent transcontinental Rayleigh wave packets in the 20 to 50 s period band. These "stormquakes" migrate coincident with the storms, but are effectively spatiotemporally focused seismic point sources with equivalent earthquake magnitudes that can be greater than 3.5. Stormquakes thus provide new coherent sources to investigate Earth structure in locations that typically lack both seismic instrumentation and earthquakes. Moreover, they provide a new geophysical observable with high spatial and temporal resolution with which to investigate ocean wave dynamics during large storms.

Click to expand...

Source: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL084217

Meanwhile, a lot of the areas that were hit by Typhoon 19 last week are still flooded and are now threatened by heavy rainfalls this weekend.

You remind me of that shake back on the 12th while in the middle of that typhoon. I've gotten pretty good, again, at not letting shakes bother me so much, but that one really had my skin crawling like those first few months after 3/11.

The really awful part is for me it takes me back many, many years ago when I was on active duty and just had to allow for the possibility that I simply wasn't going to make it out of that AO alive and so just live one day at a time, or even one hour at a time and make the most of life while it is still in you. One doesn't really fully understand what an awful way of thinking/living that is until after they get through it and have a few months to realize they did get through it and then it sinks in how really low in life their thinking got. And even that doesn't really explain it. But it is awful.

Then for a few months after 3/11 I started getting some of that back and it was not a good thing. And then on the 12th, for just a very short time, it sort of started to creep back into my recognizing the mental signs of it being there and it is just too weird and really no good.

The really weird thing is that it is different from what one goes through when they are informed they have a terminal medical condition, like I have. There is something very different, and I still haven't figured that one out. I might not, either.

But that business on the 12th sure did bring back some old, old and very unpleasant style stuff in my stupid old brain.

But for more concrete stuff, that water flowing all over the place made some folks realize the value in those deep, deep "river" channels the engineers have cut through some neighborhoods. Maybe 275 days of the year you cross over one of those deep --- what we normally would call 'creeks' in many places in the U.S. --- anyway you cross over and look way down into that deep channel and wonder why they spent all the extra money to build it so deep and then a TY19 comes along and the answer is given to you.

Overflow control --- they have that engineering skill at par excellence in this country, yes?