National
Faith Aquino on Jun 17 2013
The city of Iwanuma at the
Miyagi Prefecture has finally completed its artificial hill intended to alleviate damages brought by a tsunami. Named
Sennen Kino no Oka or “Hill of Hope for 1,000 years,” the 8-metre hill has gathered about 4,500 people on Sunday to complete the work. Those who came, most of which were volunteers, planted 30,000 seedlings from 17 trees like oak and beech.
The restoration
Rikuzentakata’s “miracle pine tree” in Iwate Prefecture was supposed to be due in March this year. After some extra work, the reconstruction of the tree – dubbed as such because it was the only pine tree in the area that survived the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami – is finally complete after nine months’ worth of restoration work has been done on it, and now stands proudly in the city whose residents claims that the tree gives them hope for the future.
A new Moai statue – those amazing human figure sculptures from
Easter Island in Chile – is set to be unveiled on Saturday in the small Japanese fishing town of Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, more than 10,000 kilometers away from the famous sculptures’ original home. The statue is a gift – handmade by Rapa Nui sculptors from Easter Island – of the Chilean government to the town, in a gesture of hope and encouragement as the northeastern village rebuilds from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated it.
A German research team has revealed that they have found a new, better, and more accurate early warning system for
tsunamis. This new system is based on global positioning satellite (GPS) data and a network of GPS-enabled sensors on the coastal areas of tsunami-prone areas. The research team said that a system like this would have made a difference in the March 2011 tsunami that hit Japan and caused widespread devastation.
The predicted big
Nankai Trough earthquake could kill as many as 1,800 people in the Izu and Ogasawara island chains, mostly from the tsunami aftermath, according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. They are also estimating 1,282 structures could also be affected if a magnitude 9 tremor strikes the region, 1,160 of those due to waves from the
tsunami.
Fireworks shows are meant to amuse and amaze people, but they can also serve as an educational tool, if used in the right way. A volunteer group of pyrotechnists from Awa,
Tokushima Prefecture put on a virtual tsunami show last May 5 as part of a charity event to raise
funds for victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone countries in Southeast Asia – the country has been hit with major cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis in the past decade killing tens of thousands of people. But the Southeast Asian archipelago is getting a boost from Japan – as part of a bilateral cooperation project, an advanced early warning system for earthquakes and tsunami modeled on Japan’s own domestic emergency warning system will be implemented in the country.
National
Ida Torres on Apr 24 2013
Different people have different ways of dealing with their traumatic experiences from the earthquake and tsunami disasters of 2011. For 16 year old Yusaku Yoshida, he thought of leaving a reminder for future generations in Otsuchi,
Iwate Prefecture on what to do during another massive earthquake. And that reminder was turned into a wooden monument, unveiled in a ceremony in the Ando district.
Rikuzentakata was one of the worst affected places in Japan during the
Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. The subsequent tsunami took 10% of their population and left only three buildings standing. They have learned to live with the loss and celebrate the little things, like discovering that a high school's science program boat washed up in Crescent City, California.
At the request of the Japanese government, the International Atomic Energy Agency (
IAEA) is launching a new review into the decommissioning process of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (
TEPCO) stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. The nuclear facility, which suffered multiple core meltdowns during the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has been suffering multiple setbacks with regards to cooling and storage in the past few weeks and IAEA was brought in at the central government’s behest to look into the current situation.
