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Japan's quake hit areas remain under blackout

https://www.chemnet.com   Mar 14,2011 commodityonline
Most parts of japans' quake hit regions remained under blackout as around 5.57 million households were affected while more than 1 million households had had their water supply cut off.

Power outage that disabled a nuclear reactor's cooling system, triggering evacuation orders for about 3,000 residents as the government declared its first-ever state of emergency at a nuclear plant.

Japanese authorities however said the amount of radioactive element in the vapour would be "very small" and would not affect the environment or human health.

Meanwhile, the US said it had transported coolant to the nuclear power plant as backup generators needed to power cooling systems after the plants shut down automatically following the quake.

Friday's devastated earthquake was the fifth biggest to hit the world since record gathering began in 1900 and the most powerful to hit Japan.

It caused a rupture 300 kilometers long and 150 kilometers wide in the sea floor 130 kilometers off the eastern coast of Japan. It happened 25 kilometers beneath the sea floor.

The quake was caused when one giant tectonic plate was shoved under another, the type of movement that produces the biggest earthquakes. It's the same kind of quake that caused the devastating 2004 Indonesian tsunami.

Japan's worst quake in modern times was a magnitude-8.3 in 1923 in Kanto that killed 143,000 people. A 7.2-magnitude quake in Kobe in 1995 killed 6,400 people.

Experts said although the tsunami caused extensive damages, death tolls were relatively low as Japan has the strongest building standards in the world for withstanding earthquakes and adopted an expensive earthquake early warning system that gave people a precious few seconds to duck and cover.

Japan has an early warning system based on the type of waves generated by faults. That alerted residents about 15 seconds before they felt shaking. Sensors note the earliest arriving, fast-moving primary, or compression, waves.

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