Wobble wobble
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 6:56 am
This is long, the tl;dr version: I'm OK.
I've been online a couple times since the quake, even raided on saturday night, but thought I'd give you a heads up...
I was at the office when the quake hit 10th floor. Grabbed a hardhat, dove under my desk and rode it out. Never been so scared before in my life, this was like no earthquake in the 14 years I've been here. Overall damage in my area - my coffee spilled all over the floors, potted plants down and a shredder full of paper bits knocked over and onto the floor. The next room over was not so lucky - A row of heavy metal cabinets was knocked over and toppled onto 4 desks. Thankfully the normal occupants of those desks, one of them being a dear friend of mine, were not sitting at them at the time or there would have been some serious injuries.
We retained power through the whole thing and our data centre on the 4th floor was totally unaffected. We lost contact with our data centre in Sendai and the call centre in Sapporo (which was routed through Sendai) though. It took us about 24 hours to get all that back up and the Sendai location came dangerously close to running out of diesel for their generators before the mains power was restored there.
Later on in the afternoon we were released to go home if we wanted to, though all train/subway service was halted until they could inspect the tracks. The trains actually never started running until the next day. The other three people in my group hung out a little while to see if transit would restart quickly and we waited until about 8pm to leave. One of my co-workers that lived in the same general direction as me and I had planned a route via bus, we could catch one bus from right in front of the office to Ueno Park, connect there with a second bus to Kinshicho where he was only about 5-10 minutes from home and I could catch a third bus to where I live. We fortunately managed to squeeze onto a very crowded bus fairly quickly and made our way to Ueno Park. Unfortunately this must have been the last bus still running in Tokyo because when we got there the people standing waiting for the second bus had said they hadn't seen any busses picking people up there in 2 hours. After about 15 minutes there ourselves someone came by and said that the Ginza subway line had started operation again. THIS would get me closer to home (I would have been 8-9 miles away at that point still), so I made my way over there and caught a very lightly populated train as far as Nihonbashi where I could connect with my home line if it was up. Unfortunately it wasn't and I had to set off on foot. Its basically a straight 5 mile walk down a single street across 2 rivers and 3 wards, but about 11:30pm I managed to get to my home area.
At this point my instinct said "don't go straight home, go in search of food" so I stopped in the local supermarket on the way home. This would later prove to have been a very smart thing, as they had lots of fresh foods, vegetables, meat, eggs, bread, etc. and had not been that busy yet. Bread, milk and eggs are currently in very short supply, but meats/veg are still in relative plenty. The problems right now are logistical really, getting the food from the producers to the stores.
I'm stocked up on LOTS of food. I've still got perishables so my retort-pouch stuff is still on the shelf but I've got enough to last at least 2 weeks if all the stores boarded up tomorrow.
So that's basically it. Work has started up on monday morning, commute was hellish but today was better. From tomorrow we're allowed to telecommute (management came back to me with hat in hand to restart the VPN system I was forced to retire in favor of one of the other department's supposedly-better one. It doesn't have the features they really need to support full telecommuting).
I'm carrying my passport and enough cash to buy myself a full-fare ticket to anywhere in the world right now just in case everything goes to pieces (we had M3.9 and M4.1 quakes right in the middle of Tokyo bay last night).
I think I'm going to be requesting a medical leave starting next week and go overseas (Cebu or Bangkok) and have my eyes lasiked. Its something I've been planning on (my vision's taken a turn for the worse in the last year after being stable for the last 10-15), and I think this might be a good time to move it up, as it gets me out of the chaos.
Oh forgot to mention - nothing major in my apartment fell over. 40" TV still standing, microwave still perched on top of the fridge, and expensive cameras still on the high shelves where I foolishly had them sitting (this has since been rectified). One bookshelf emptied its DVDs onto the floor, but still remained standing, that was the whole extent of the chaos.
I've been online a couple times since the quake, even raided on saturday night, but thought I'd give you a heads up...
I was at the office when the quake hit 10th floor. Grabbed a hardhat, dove under my desk and rode it out. Never been so scared before in my life, this was like no earthquake in the 14 years I've been here. Overall damage in my area - my coffee spilled all over the floors, potted plants down and a shredder full of paper bits knocked over and onto the floor. The next room over was not so lucky - A row of heavy metal cabinets was knocked over and toppled onto 4 desks. Thankfully the normal occupants of those desks, one of them being a dear friend of mine, were not sitting at them at the time or there would have been some serious injuries.
We retained power through the whole thing and our data centre on the 4th floor was totally unaffected. We lost contact with our data centre in Sendai and the call centre in Sapporo (which was routed through Sendai) though. It took us about 24 hours to get all that back up and the Sendai location came dangerously close to running out of diesel for their generators before the mains power was restored there.
Later on in the afternoon we were released to go home if we wanted to, though all train/subway service was halted until they could inspect the tracks. The trains actually never started running until the next day. The other three people in my group hung out a little while to see if transit would restart quickly and we waited until about 8pm to leave. One of my co-workers that lived in the same general direction as me and I had planned a route via bus, we could catch one bus from right in front of the office to Ueno Park, connect there with a second bus to Kinshicho where he was only about 5-10 minutes from home and I could catch a third bus to where I live. We fortunately managed to squeeze onto a very crowded bus fairly quickly and made our way to Ueno Park. Unfortunately this must have been the last bus still running in Tokyo because when we got there the people standing waiting for the second bus had said they hadn't seen any busses picking people up there in 2 hours. After about 15 minutes there ourselves someone came by and said that the Ginza subway line had started operation again. THIS would get me closer to home (I would have been 8-9 miles away at that point still), so I made my way over there and caught a very lightly populated train as far as Nihonbashi where I could connect with my home line if it was up. Unfortunately it wasn't and I had to set off on foot. Its basically a straight 5 mile walk down a single street across 2 rivers and 3 wards, but about 11:30pm I managed to get to my home area.
At this point my instinct said "don't go straight home, go in search of food" so I stopped in the local supermarket on the way home. This would later prove to have been a very smart thing, as they had lots of fresh foods, vegetables, meat, eggs, bread, etc. and had not been that busy yet. Bread, milk and eggs are currently in very short supply, but meats/veg are still in relative plenty. The problems right now are logistical really, getting the food from the producers to the stores.
I'm stocked up on LOTS of food. I've still got perishables so my retort-pouch stuff is still on the shelf but I've got enough to last at least 2 weeks if all the stores boarded up tomorrow.
So that's basically it. Work has started up on monday morning, commute was hellish but today was better. From tomorrow we're allowed to telecommute (management came back to me with hat in hand to restart the VPN system I was forced to retire in favor of one of the other department's supposedly-better one. It doesn't have the features they really need to support full telecommuting).
I'm carrying my passport and enough cash to buy myself a full-fare ticket to anywhere in the world right now just in case everything goes to pieces (we had M3.9 and M4.1 quakes right in the middle of Tokyo bay last night).
I think I'm going to be requesting a medical leave starting next week and go overseas (Cebu or Bangkok) and have my eyes lasiked. Its something I've been planning on (my vision's taken a turn for the worse in the last year after being stable for the last 10-15), and I think this might be a good time to move it up, as it gets me out of the chaos.
Oh forgot to mention - nothing major in my apartment fell over. 40" TV still standing, microwave still perched on top of the fridge, and expensive cameras still on the high shelves where I foolishly had them sitting (this has since been rectified). One bookshelf emptied its DVDs onto the floor, but still remained standing, that was the whole extent of the chaos.
