POWERFUL QUAKE PARALYSES JAPAN

This the edit I wrote for Sakaal Times Pune.on Japan quake. http://epaper.sakaaltimes.com/SakaalTimes/12Mar2011/Enlarge/page8.htm  

A powerful earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale that struck Japan on Friday afternoon at 2.46 pm local time and triggered a devastating tsunami has led to issuance of tsunami warnings globally. The Hawai-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning across most of the Pacific Ocean and said the tsunami would threaten coastal areas ofRussia, Taiwan, Hawaii, Indonesia, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, the west coasts of the United States, Mexico, Central America and South America. Mercifully, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad, has categorically stated that India does not face the tsunami threat. Another relief from the Indian perspective is that there are no reports of any harm to any of the 25,000 Indians living in Japan, though the quake has killed 48 people in Japan, as per the last update from the Japanese news service Kyodo. Friday’s quake in Japan is the fifth most powerful quake in the world since 1900. However, it goes to the credit of technologically highly advanced Japanese that so few deaths have occurred despite such a powerful quake. Had such a quake hit a developing nation, the casualties would have been in hundreds of thousands. In Japan itself, more than one lakh people had died in the 1923 Great Kanto quake in Tokyo and its vicinity, though that quake measured only 7.9.

The quake, that originated at a depth of around 10 kilometers 130 kilometers east-southeast in the Pacific off the coast of Ojika Peninsula in Sendai city, resulted in shutting down of trains across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo and severely disrupted air travel. East Japan Railway Co. suspended all services on its Shinkansen bullet train and other lines in the Tokyo metropolitan area. A fire broke out at the nuclear plant in Onagawa, triggering fears of another Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster of Russia a quarter century ago; though Japanese officials said the fire was extinguished. The tsunami triggered by the quake swept away a ship carrying more than 100 people. A second major earthquake of 7.4 magnitude was reported as aftershocks shook the region. Mobile phone networks were paralysed across central and northern Japan. Power blackouts affected about 2 million residents around Tokyo alone. Tokyo’s Narita airport shut its runways for safety checks.Prime Minister Naoto Kan held an emergency meeting and pledged that the government will work on the crisis with its "whole body and soul".

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