Japan Earth­quake (update 3) Sit­u­a­tion wors­ens after triple dis­as­ters hit Japan
Dam­age fol­low­ing the worst earth­quake in 140 years and a tsuna­mi that wiped away part of north-east Japan, comes news of pow­er out­ages caused by major trou­ble at a nuclear pow­er station.
Ken Yamamo­to JA1CJP reports that accord­ing to police infor­ma­tion as of 10am local time on March 14, the death toll is 1,627 and the report­ed miss­ing per­son count is 1,720.
“It is only the offi­cial count and the num­ber is still expect­ed to increase. Thou­sands of bod­ies are report­ed to have been found on the coast of the tsuna­mi suf­fered area,” he said.
A Miya­gi pre­fec­ture source says that the death toll will be in the order of ten thou­sands in that pre­fec­ture alone.
The 8.9 on the Richter scale quake hit off north-east­ern Sendai durn­ing the late after­noon on Fri­day March 11, and trig­gered a ten-metre tsunami.
At the request of Cen­tral Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Com­mit­tee, Ken JA1CJP, the IARU Region­al 3 Sec­re­tary, said the JARL is oper­at­ing its HQ sta­tion JA1RL in Tokyo, and region­al HQ stations.
Ear­li­er it was report­ed that JA1RL was using 7 MHz SSB, 144 MHz SSB/FM and 430 MHz SSB/FM.
He said, “Many oth­er radio ama­teurs are thanked for pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion and exchang­ing sup­port to the res­cue and dis­as­ter relief oper­a­tions. Those who can oper­ate in the affect­ed areas are pro­vid­ing a life­line for res­cue teams and those at local shel­ters. Some sta­tions are oper­at­ing with car bat­ter­ies and oth­ers with engine generators.”
Ken JA1CJP said, “Anoth­er prob­lem is the nuclear pow­er plant where the water sup­ply sys­tem fail­ure caused over­heat­ing of the nuclear fuel bar. That causes­some radioac­tive gas release from the plant and peo­ple have been evac­u­at­ed from the sur­round­ing area.”
The earth­quake also dam­aged elec­tric pow­er gen­er­a­tion plants fuelled by oil or nat­ur­al gas, result­ing in a short­age of electricity.
Tokyo Elec­tric Pow­er Com­pa­ny plans to stop sup­ply­ing pow­er to cer­tain parts of its ser­vice area on rota­tion basis to cut pow­er con­sump­tion. This short­age of pow­er may also stop or restrict the oper­a­tion of the train sys­tems around Tokyo.
— Jim Lin­ton, VK3PC, Chair­man IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.