The earthquake on 3/11/2011

As reported in Nature, there was a huge earthquake in Tohoku area, and many peoples were killed by tsunami in the area near from seaside.

Our laboratory placed on the top of the small mountain called Aoba-yama, which is far from the sea side zone, but some of the buildings were heavily damaged. One of the most damaged buildings was appeared in the Nature news.

Our building was slightly damaged, but it took one week to recover the electronic supplies, and two weeks were required to get water supplies. Our group worked with computers, and did not use any living organisms, so the damages were limited to the computers, but the damages of the wet laboratory were unexpectedly large. It may take one year to recover their scientific activity.

Our computer room existed in the 1st floor, so it was lucky for us to get almost no damage on the main computers of our laboratory, but our main rooms were placed in the 5th floor, so many equipments were heavily damaged.

For example, display of iMac was crashed.

Large LCD for TV meeting system was broken.

My partition wall was broken, and many books fell down…

My printer fallen down, but it looks ok at a glance.

A few days later, the printer turned out to be broken as follows.

FAX was also broken.

When the earthquake attacked, I was in my room, and I could luckily move under the desk and escape the building just after the main earthquake. The earthquake continued a few minutes, but I felt it was a long time..

Although 1st building of our department was heavily damaged, my building was luckily ok, and 2nd building was also OK. But, the ground around the 2nd building was became waved, so I’m very worried about the stability of the building.

earthquake attacked

Other faculty also had large damages. One of the most serious damage was reported in the top page of Faculty of Agriculture. They had a field center in the vicinity of Onagawa bay area.

We made sure the safety of all members in our buildings in about 10 minites, and everybody tried to go home to meet their own family. Usually, it only takes 20min to go home, but 2 hours were required to get home. Almost all the electronic supplies were stopped, and the beautiful stars in the dark sky was very impressive.

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