Posted on my other blog as well:

Mostly bad news. The nuclear emergency is only getting worse. I’ve read some extremely alarming things from pretty reliable sources. Of course it’s hard to be sure what to believe–even setting aside the likelihood that the Japanese government and the power company representatives would put a rosy spin on things to prevent panic, it must be very hard for even the people right at the scene to be sure exactly what’s going on or what will happen.

It seems very likely that there will be a major meltdown. The only chance to stop it seems to be a suicide mission by engineers at the site. There is no doubt in my mind that there are enough who will volunteer to carry out the mission, and those who do will be honored as heroes. What is uncertain is whether it will work.

The only good news is that the winds continue to blow out to sea which is normal and constant for this time of year, minimizing the land contamination and danger to the population, especially those of us in the south. But the high winds are also the reason that such things as dumping water from helicopters haven’t worked.

I have packed a backpack with water bottles and such, and I’ll get Junko to pack a bag too. We are going to coordinate with the rest of our family here on where to meet in case we need to move quickly to a shelter or even another city. Frankly we’d probably be better off sealing up the apartment and staying indoors if we got a dose of fallout. The chances of Fukuoka receiving dangerous levels of radiation are still quite small, but it feels better to be ready. And anyway, I should’ve put together a good emergency pack for each of us years ago.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for leaving Japan altogether at this point. A lot of my colleagues are traveling abroad right now, in fact, as it’s between school terms at the moment. I wouldn’t blame any who delay their return, either. But I have a wife, kids, grandkids…I’m not going anywhere. Not unless I can take them all with me.

Another update on my friends&family blog.

[  Mood: Scared ]
On Facebook, I’ve been keeping a running commentary on the unfolding disaster here in Japan, and I posted an entry to my family-and-friends blog on that as well. All this is mostly just to let people know I’m OK. Junko and I and the kids are well outside the danger zone.

In a way, I’m kind of used to this sort of thing. On a per-square-kilometer basis, Japan has the most earthquakes of any country in the world, and every time we have one big enough to make the news, I get emails from overseas making sure I’m OK. Naturally, few of those quakes are close enough to my city for me to notice. I’ve only been in one significant quake in my entire life (Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of them), and while terrifying, the only thing that fell down in my apartment was my Shakespeare Action Figure.

This, of course, is different. This is one of those events that Japan will be marking with about five minutes of silence (the duration of the quake) at 2:46 in the afternoon every March 11th for at least a generation. I haven’t felt the main quake or any of the dozens of serious pre- and after-shocks, and Fukuoka was very fortunate in experiencing only minor tsunami swells. But the effect on Japan as a whole, and all of us living here, is profound. Exactly what those effects will be are still unknown–with aftershocks and radiation leakage from damaged powerplants, this catastrophe is still developing.

Here is an article with links to international aid groups that are providing disaster relief.