Mowing accomplished

I was finally able to mow the lawn after at least three weeks. In some parts of the front lawn, which receives the most sun, the grass was close to a foot tall. And even though the dew had burned off and it hasn't rained in a few days, the grass clippings were damp - water-fat, from a long, wet summer - and kept choking the lawnmower. The back lawn went much faster.

There's probably one more mowing left for this year. Maybe two. One year I did the final mowing in November.

I may be working on a poem about two women who drowned while trapped in the back of a van on Tuesday night when they were being transported from a mental evaluation to another facility in South Carolina. The two sheriff's deputies who were driving them - and apparently made the decision to drive around barriers and onto a flooded and worsening stretch of road - were able to extricate themselves. But the women - conscious and talking, but trapped - drowned in the back of that van,in the cold waters of the Little Pee Dee River. It's a story that fills me with such outrage that a poem may be the only way to produce anything coherent.

No post. Sleep now.

I had a post I wanted to write, expressing outrage at the deaths of two mental patients in South Carolina who drowned when the van they were being transported in drove into onto a blocked-off area of road and into flood waters. The two sheriff's deputies in the van were able to get to a place where they could be rescued, but the two women in the transport area of the van were trapped and drowned.

I expect this will be swept under the rug, just a footnote to all of the devastation Hurricane Florence brought. But this is something that cannot be neglected. Someone was criminally negligent, and two patients in the care of the state were allowed to die a slow, horrible  death.

But I will express that outrage at a later time. Now I must sleep.

Florence has arrived

Florence is making landfall in North Carolina. I've heard reports of twelve foot storm surges. The storm has slowed down, meaning it will linger and grind on each area it passes through for a long time.

It will be a week or more before we have a sense of how much damage has been done. At it will be much longer before the affected areas have made a significant recovery.

...hell, some parts of New Orleans haven't fully recovered yet from Katrina, which hit in 2005.

Storm surge and your car

Florence is coming. This huge hurricane will make landfall sometime in the next day or so, and will bring with it storm surge - a piling-up of seawater that will cause flooding to a depth of as much as nine feet.

Even if you think that you're safe from the storm, even if you're in a reinforced building well above flood level, one thing you need to ask yourself is: where is your car parked?

For most people, the answer will be "on the street." And that's a very bad place for it to be. At the very least you can expect your vehicle to be flooded, sustaining waster damage that will leave a soggy, smelly mess. A little more water - two to three feet, according to the Weather Channel - can float your car. More than that will flood the engine compartment and the entire inside of your car. This isn't just water we're talking about - this is salty sea water, probably full of particles of sand. In addition to the damage to your paint job, salt water can interact unpleasantly with your car's battery, electrical system, and fuel. After Coney Island and other parts of New York City were flooded by Superstorm Sandy back in 2012, numerous inundated vehicles shorted out and caught fire - and sometimes exploded.

Not every car flooded by storm surge will be destroyed. Some will be cleaned up and put back on the market without any information regarding their flood-damaged status. Just as after Sandy, for the next few years buyers of used cars will need to carefully inspect all vehicles for tell-tale signs of flood damage.

It would be so much easier for people in the danger zone to avoid all this by getting themselves - and their cars - to the safety of higher ground. Please consider it.

The floods of mid-August

It's flooding in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Not in Nanticoke, for once, or our big sister Wilkes-Barre, though the Susquehanna was riding high yesterday, and will probably be higher tomorrow. Locally the flooding is in and around Bloomsburg to the southwest, and Scranton and the surrounding area (including, notably, Clarks Summit) to the northeast. Major roadways are flooded and impassable. Whole neighborhoods are cut off. Some idiotically unethical white water rafting outfit in Jim Thorpe decided that today would be a fine day for a planned outing, despite the dire weather forecasts. Over two hundred rafters were swept away, and about fifty of them had to be rescued. (The rest presumably rescued themselves, though there's still time for bad news to trickle in.)

The spotty but intense showers which have been the norm this spring and summer are expected to continue for the next few days. This may mean more flooding - either in areas that have so far been spared, or in areas that have already been devastated.

Water in the Basement, April 6, 2017

It's been years since I had to break out the pumps and hoses, but the time has come again.

The winter storm dubbed "Stella" by the folks at the Weather Channel dumped over two feet of snow on us between March 14th and 15th. The snow finally melted away by March 30th, leaving the ground a soggy mess and the Susquehanna running high. Today a storm system that has done brutal damage across the country swept into Northeastern Pennsylvania, pounding down rain for hours. (This is in addition to a surprise pop-up storm that delivered a brief but intense downpour on April 4th.)

I stepped out of the house around 2:00 this afternoon to run some errands. The rain was coming down hard, and already water was ponding on the lawn.  The storm drains were doing their job keeping the streets of Nanticoke flood-free. Wilkes-Barre was another story, and I found myself swerving into the middle of the road to avoid puddles of unknown (and unknowable) depth, some of them welling up from beneath the surface of the road.

I got back home around 5:00. The heaviest rain seemed to have already passed, but the ponding in the yard was terrible. The ground was clearly saturated. How much more water would it be asked to absorb?

I checked the basement from the top of the steps. No standing water, no wet cat prints. Good signs.

On closer inspection, water had come in - and possibly already receded - in the sections that take on water first, the southeast and southwest corners. I made a note to lay down towel dams, get the pumps and hoses ready, and keep an eye on the water.

A few minutes later, water began creeping up rapidly.

I retrieved the hoses, attached them to the pumps. Set the pumps up where the water was deepest, close to an inch. Directed their outlets into a shower drain. Watched the volume of water quickly overwhelm the slow drain.

I redirected the hoses into a toilet, where the increasing volume of water in the bowl caused the toilet to flush itself several times before I realized I should turn off the water inlet and stop wasting fresh water.

After an hour or so, the standing water had been reduced to wet residue. I turned off the pumps. A few minutes later, as the water level on the floor began to rise again, I turned the pumps on again.

It's going to be a long night.

40 years after the flood

Until last September, if you spoke to anyone in Northeastern Pennsylvania about "the flood" they would know exactly what you meant. Some old-timers might remember the St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936, but for everyone else "the flood" meant one thing.

Agnes.

Floods don't get names, not like that. Agnes was a Tropical Storm that, in June 1972, blew along the Eastern Seaboard up from the Gulf of Mexico on a meandering, lazy course that took it over land, over the Atlantic, and then back over land - through New York City and then up into upstate New York. Northeastern Pennsylvania got smacked with the outer bands (just like with Irene in 2011, which also hit New York City but then set its sights on New England), but the real damage was done when the remnant of Agnes parked itself over the headwaters of the Susquehanna (just like Lee a week after Irene last year - though Lee also dumped rain on Northeastern Pennsylvania for days, as did Agnes.)

The Susquehanna rose and rose, threatening to overtop the levees that had built in the wake of the flood of '36. A heroic effort was made to augment the dikes with sandbags. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for the flood zone. Many complied. Some refused to leave.

And then, in a horrific moment, the sandbags gave way. The river came through. Photos captured the terror of people who had moments before been fighting to hold back the river with sandbags now running for their lives.

Very few people died in the flood itself, and mostly from heart attacks and things like that. Those who refused to evacuate had to be rescued by boat, sometimes from upper stories, sometimes from rooftops.

I had  a relative who lived in the flood zone - my father's mother's sister's mother-in-law. She didn't think the river would break through the levees. She didn't think she would be affected. She was wrong. She had to be evacuated from a third story window.

I was just four when Agnes hit. Now it would be considered crazy to take a four-year-old into a flood zone, even a month or more after the waters had receded. But things were different back then. And the visit to this relative's house left a memory that has stayed with me forever.

Even at that age I loved books. Comic books, paperbacks, hardbacks, books of all sorts. What I saw broke my heart.

We were in a large empty room. Cleanup had obviously been going on for some time at that point. But some things just couldn't be cleaned. Like the stains on the ceiling.

The room I was in had probably been their living room. Maybe their library, even. It was where their books had been. And when the floodwaters came through, those books were knocked off their shelves, caught up in the water, and floated up to the ceiling.

The water didn't stop at the first floor. It chased my relatives up to their third floor. So the first floor was filled completely. The books rose to the top and were pressed against the ceiling, at least until they absorbed enough water to sink. In the meantime, they had left an impression.

The ceiling of that room was tattooed with the colors of the covers of hundreds of books that had been pressed against it.

It was a strange and beautiful sight, and horrifying at the same time. I knew that all those books that someone had once read and loved enough to buy were now garbage heaped in piles along the streets. Just like everything else that these people had ever owned.

Thirty-nine years later it happened again. Not in Wilkes-Barre or in Kingston, where my relatives had lived. They were protected by a levee-raising project that was completed in response to Agnes. This time it was in West Pittston and Shickshnny and other places. People lost everything because of the power of a flood.

I wonder if in thirty-nine years people will remember Lee the way we remember Agnes?

Some dreams

I've been under rather a lot of stress lately, and I've recently started having unsettling dreams. I figured I'd write them down here while I can still remember them.

1. Batman

The first one was Tuesday morning, and came in at least two pieces. (I know you only remember dreams if you wake up during them; I believe the piece contained in this paragraph ended before I woke up at 4:30, and then the rest happened when I fell back asleep until 6:30.) It was a dream about Batman - or, more specifically, Bruce Wayne. Even more specifically, the Christian Bale version of Bruce Wayne. I don't remember the particulars of the parts of the dream that preceded this part, but I remember I found myself in a small conference room in the headquarters of Wayne Industries, a room just big enough for maybe six people to meet around a small table. The room wasn't designed for privacy, because it had big windows all around, including on the doors, and seemed to be just off a main corridor. I must have been an observer in this dream, because I remember seeing Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne sitting across the table from me, while a young boy sat next to me. The boy looked like young Frank McCourt from the movie version of Angela's Ashes, maybe twelve years old, and he and Bruce Wayne were both wearing wool coats, as if they had both just come in from outside. Bruce Wayne looked troubled, and the boy looked scared. And all Bruce Said was, "Why did you press that button?" I thought What button?, and assumed he was talking about a doorbell of some sort, but then I realized that he must be talking about the secret button that reveals the current hiding place for all of Bruce Wayne's Batman stuff. This kid must have discovered that Bruce Wayne was Batman! I realized that I was sitting next to this Batman franchise's version of Robin!

Then all hell broke loose.

A thug slammed open the door of the conference room and began shouting at Bruce Wayne. Business, I thought, and took note of the man: mid-thirties, big, heavy, balding with dark, maybe chestnut frizzy hair, a greasy moustache and goatee, wearing a gray wool topcoat over business clothes. He was shouting with an accent, and there were two other thuggish-looking guys behind him.  Russian mob, I thought, and Wayne Industries security showed up and pulled the guys out of the doorway. Bruce Wayne returned to questioning the boy when suddenly alarms went off and the hall outside the room took on a sickly yellow hue. Wayne muttered under his breath and got up and exited the room into the hall. Very quickly he turned around to come back into the room, but he seemed to be having trouble moving. He didn't open the door, but instead moved one arm as though he were attempting to break the glass in the door. His arm hit the door, very slowly, and there was a sound of smashing glass, but the door didn't break, and he stood there, wide-eyed, on the other side of the door, frozen in place.

The boy rushed to the door and opened it, and he and I pulled Bruce Wayne back inside. The hall outside the room was full of alarms and shouting, and felt very weird, and everywhere there was that sickly yellow light. Bruce Wayne felt cold and stiff, and even his clothes felt odd - crinkly, almost brittle. We got him onto the table but he was frozen in the position  he had been in outside - dead, as far as I could tell, and dead for some time; yet his eyes were still wide open and clear.

The boy went to the door again and left the room to confront whatever was going on outside, but like Bruce Wayne, he also didn't get very far. He froze in place a few steps from the door, and I was just able to tug his stiff and seemingly lifeless body back into the room.

Great, I thought. Batman's dead, Robin's dead, and something out there will kill me if I leave the room. What could I do?

I woke up, and never found out.


2. The Flood

Back in 1972, the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania saw a flood of historic proportions. It is known by the name of the Tropical Storm that fed it: Agnes. Thirty-nine years later, another of these once-in-a-lifetime events happened, and the valley took on tremendous damage from the September 2011 flood.

In this dream from last night, we were hit by another storm, even worse than anything that had preceded it. It caused flooding throughout Nanticoke, which is a city built (for the most part) on hills, and generally above any realistic projected flooding. (Unless all of the storm drains were to stop working; then the streets would flood very rapidly, and some have done so in the past.)

I don't remember many of the particulars of this dream, which I only remembered because of a precipitation forecast map on television. I remember helping people to evacuate, and re-evacuate, and watching waters rising higher and higher.

The reality is: last year's storm hurt us, badly. It caused a lot of devastation in a lot of places. We didn't see a repeat of the utter devastation seen in Wilkes-Barre in 1972 because of improvements to the levee system there that had been in the works since the St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936, but weren't completed until 1996 or so. But the 2011 flood put these levees to the test, and came within inches of overtopping them, and actually drilled under them in various "boils" which, to the layman's eye. looked a heck of a lot like leaks and breaches. All that stress damaged the levees. They wouldn't be able to withstand another flood of that magnitude without major repair work, repair work that will require allocation of funds from the U.S. Congress. Funds which are not likely to be forthcoming in the near future.

So, bottom line: if this area is hit with another flood of this magnitude in the next year, or five years, or maybe decade, or perhaps quarter-century, the levee system will not be able to protect Wilkes-Barre or the surrounding areas again.  And this nightmare will be a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of people.


3. Late for work, and a forbidden cell phone

Today would have been my day to go back to work if I were not once again on layoff. In this dream I found myself racing in to work at the last minute. I parked my car, raced down two levels of steps across the parking lot, and made it into the plant. I was about to pass through the metal detector at the entrance to the plant when I realized I had my cell phone in my pocket. This is a major no-no at work, and I decided to risk the possibility that there had been a rule change: could I leave my phone with the guards, rather than take it back out to my car and be late for work? After some discussion among themselves they agreed that I could, but I wouldn't be able to punch in as normal, swiping my badge through a reader. Instead I would have to carry an old-style time card. Only this wasn't a normal time card; it was more like a giant library card, with the names of everyone else who had carried it before me written on it. So I took the time card, and went through the turnstiles, and got halfway to the place where I would get my work assignment for the day, when I realized 1) I was still carrying my forbidden cell phone, and 2) I was late anyway!

I woke up, and checked the message on the system that would tell me if I was working or not. And the answer this time was "not." Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day, or the next...

Are river crests getting higher?

The Susquehanna in Wilkes-Barre crested (that is, reached its highest level) during last week's flood at a height of 42 feet, eight inches - a new record. Are river crests getting higher, and is this a natural consequence of development and deforestation?

Prompted by the discovery by amateur historian Philip Lord of a photo tucked into an old book, I wrote this post that looked at the history of flooding in Wilkes-Barre from 1936 through 2010:

Another Monkey: Sterling Hotel and Market Street Bridge, 1936 and 2010

In that entry I included this tidbit:

From the Luzerne County Riverfront Project site:

Although numerous floods occurred in the Wyoming Valley, and some levees had been constructed to try to prevent wide-spread flooding, the valley was unprepared for the flood that struck on St. Patrick’s Day, 1936. That day the Susquehanna crested in Wilkes-Barre and Kingston at 33 feet, and flood waters flowed for miles across the Wyoming Valley.

The devastation wrought by the 1936 flood brought construction funding from Washington in the form of a valley-long, flood protection levee – at a flood stage of 36 feet. Subsequently, the Susquehanna River rose to flood stage in 1946, 1955, and 1964, with the levees providing substantial protection.

And all was well for thirty-six years until 1972, when Agnes rose above the level of the levees and broke thorough the sandbag dikes that had been built around it, reaching a crest just shy of 41 feet. Twenty-four years later there was again widespread flooding, but this flood served as the final kick to get the levees raised to a nominal height of 41 feet, plus three bonus feet. This project was completed ten years later, and was tested by Hurricane Ivan a few months later.

No other storm came close to overtopping the levees until on Labor Day 2011 and much of the week that followed the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee dumped many inches of water onto lands already saturated by Irene a week and a half earlier. Lee then parked itself over upstate New York, like Agnes, and fed the headwaters of the Susquehanna until the levees were put to the test again with a crest of approximately 42 feet 8 inches. (I love the reports that quote this as "42.66 feet" - two decimal place accuracy from a system that had been off by about 7% just a few hours earlier, when the river gauge was overwhelmed by floodwater and reported a crest of just over 39 feet.)

I don't know if it's reasonable to expect to see a "worst flood" and then have every subsequent flood back off from there. But it seems like we're seeing once-in-a-century storms every 35-40 years or so. Had there ever been a 42 foot crest before 1936? Or are higher crests a result of some evolution of the ecosystem that is causing more water to be dumped into creeks and streams that feed the river?

I can think of two potential causes of increased runoff: deforestation, especially in mountainous areas (which will also serve to increase silting-up of creeks and streams), and removal of water-absorbing land surface area through construction and paving. Could these development activities be the cause of increased river crests during catastrophic floods? If so, we should not expect the levees - at 41 or 44 feet, as the case may be - to protect Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, and Forty-Fort next time, or the time after that, or any of the times after that.


Note: I posed this question to Don Williams, the Susquehanna River Sentinel, and he concurred, and dug out a letter to the editor that he submitted to a local paper eight years ago, a letter which he located only with tremendous difficulty. He has reproduced this letter (formatting marks included) in this entry.

Blossoms, storms, and floods

Note overexposure of flowers.

Note presence of snow a few days later.

Spring is here. Has been here for a while, actually, though Winter didn't want to let go. We were hit with several late snowstorms, including one at the end of March. I have some photos of daffodils in a Guinness bottle on my memory card (impossible to get the settings right for that photo; when the bottle looks good, the flowers are horribly overexposed) followed by photos of a snow-covered landscape.

Cherry blossoms

Forsythia blossoms.  Many have already fallen.

The forsythia came into bloom a week or so ago, along with the cherry trees. The blossoms have started to rain down already. I hope that they have attracted their pollinators and will continue on with their life cycles.



Meanwhile, storms have blown through Northeastern Pennsylvania this week.  They were part of the same chains of storms that brought so much death and destruction to the south, but for us they amounted to some rain, some lightning, and some wind.  OK, a lot of each of those, with some flooding and downed trees and blocked roads.  Still, I didn't think they were heavy enough or sustained enough to be a problem.

I was wrong.

Yesterday I went on a tour of a house that is being built to function (almost) completely off the grid, with electricity generated by a solar array and a wind turbine.  It's become a running joke that horrific weather has plagued each of our tours of this location.  The first tour was stymied by a very heavy snowstorm that closed roads for a while; the second attempt went off as planned, but was accompanied by such winds that we thought the house would be blown off its foundations. The third tour was yesterday, the morning after the first wave of massive storms. I advised the woman running these tours that her next scheduled tour may be interrupted by an asteroid strike.

On my way back from the tour I meandered through a few places between there and here.  At one point I crossed the Water Street Bridge in Pittston, and I was blown away by what I saw.  The Susquehanna was high and running fast,  It was also a shade of bright orange I can't recall having ever seen before.  I took a serpentine course from there that took me back along the new Eighth Street Bridge in Pittston, across the river on Route 309 in Wilkes-Barre, and then finally back to Nanticoke across the Nanticoke-West-Nanticoke Bridge.  Each time I was astonished and a little terrified by what the river looked like.

Today I had a laundry list of things that needed getting done.  The last of those things would get wrapped up an hour or so before sunset.  This held out the promise of long shadows on the river and a good photographic opportunity.  I took it.

The river actually seems to have settled down a bit since yesterday.  The color is more like coffee with lots of milk added, but debris of all sorts is floating downriver.  Note the flooded flood plain (the Nanticoke Flats) in the background, beyond the row of trees.  This is looking south from the West Nanticoke side.

It is hard for a still picture to capture the speed and turbulence of the river.  But this one did capture my shadow on the bridge.  Note the John S. Fine Bridge in the background, currently being reinforced to handle the stresses of hundreds or thousands of Marcellus Shale-related trucks each day.  This is looking east, as you may have guessed from the shadow and the fact that I mentioned that this was an hour or so before sunset.

Looking north back towards West Nanticoke.

The river is expected to reach its maximum height sometime tomorrow, though this prediction was made before last night's storms.  It has not rained since this morning.  We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Disasters

Our weather for the last three months has followed an annoying pattern:  ice on top of snow on top of snow, then a rapid thaw, then immediately more snow, then another rapid thaw, then heavy rain followed by more snow and then more rain.  And more rain and more rain.

All this left the ground saturated, and the water table high, and conditions right for some basement flooding.  I've been preparing for this since the rains began last weekend, sweeping the basement floor and picking up any loose items and making sure I knew where my pumps were.  We dodged the flooding bullet last weekend, and every day up until yesterday.  Yesterday it was clear that we would be getting an all-day soaking rain.  My water detector started to sound sometime around ten o'clock last night, and I realized I wouldn't be getting much sleep.

At first the water was just a trickle, and it looked like I might be able to contain it with some dams made from towels.  I checked on these dams several times and it looked like they were holding.  But then the rain picked up in intensity and the saturated soil began to void its excess water into our basement.  It quickly spilled beyond the dams, until they were nothing but waterlogged towels in the middle of a partially-flooded section of our basement.  I set up the pumps and broke out the lengths of garden hose for directing the water across our cellar and through the garage and down the driveway.  These are submersible pumps that need a minimal amount of water (about one-eighth of an inch) to get the pumping action started.  Below that they will shut down, or just burn out. So it's actually necessary to allow some depth of water to accumulate before you activate them.  (Most installed sump pumps are built into holes in the cellar floor where the water will accumulate first.)  Some water had gotten into the downstairs bathroom, too, so that called for more floor towels.

After that it became a cycle of laying down towels to try to contain the spread of the water, checking the pumps to make sure they were in deep enough water, changing out dry towels for soaked ones, putting the wet towels in the washer, shutting down the pumps if they had pumped themselves dry, putting the washed towels in the dryer, and reactivating the pumps when water had accumulated again.  Over and over and over.

Eleven o'clock rolled to midnight, and I switched to the Weather Channel to get radar updates on the storm.  It looked like the  worst was past, but it would take a while for all the excess water to percolate through the soil.

I rummaged through the downstairs bedroom where I sleep when I stay over.  This is only partly below ground, so flooding must be severe for water to push into this area.  Nevertheless I looked for things that were on the floor that could be ruined by any water that might get in.  I spotted the power strip/surge protector for the VCR, DVD player, and digital cable box dangling off the edge of the entertainment center - not on the floor, but suspended by the various wires and cables leading into it.  I reeled it up and tucked it into the entertainment center, next to the TV.

The cycle continued.  At its worst I had maybe a quarter of an inch of water in some parts of the basement, maybe a little more.  The pumps pumped away, and I kept relocating them to be in the deepest part of the water.  Dry towels replaced wet, which went in the washer and then the dryer and then back on the floor.

It was getting late.  After one o'clock in the morning, maybe two.  There was a presentation I wanted to see in Scranton on Green Energy Jobs at ten o'clock, and I would have to be out of the house by nine to be sure I made it with time to spare.  Even allowing just an hour to get up and get ready, I would need to be out of bed in just six hours.  During my working days that would seem like a luxuriously excessive amount of sleep, but now it seemed barely adequate.  I got myself ready for bed, to maybe grab sleep in two hour chunks, checking the pumps and changing the towels in between. I decided to watch a little TV first.  See if the storm had truly moved on.  I hit the ON button and automatically punched up the Weather Channel.

All I got was static.

OK, it was just working a few hours ago.  What happened?  What changed? I immediately suspected the power strip / surge protector.  Had I manhandled it, maybe disconnected something?  I picked it up and examined it.  Everything seemed to be plugged in.  I unplugged everything, one at a time, and plugged it back in, just to be sure.  I noticed that the digital cable thingie didn't have an indicator light showing.  Could that be switched off?  No, the switch was in the "on" position.  Then I realized I must have switched off the power strip when I was handling it.  (The TV is plugged in separately, which is why I got static instead of nothing.)

I flipped the switch and the screen went to black as the digital cable box reinitialized.  Then it remembered that I had punched up the Weather Channel.  Or maybe that was just the last channel selected.  Either way, I was suddenly treated to images of utter devastation in Japan.

Magnitude 8.9?  That can't be right.

I flicked back and forth between the Weather Channel and CNN.  The news was unbelievable.  An earthquake of that magnitude, just off the coast?  Surely there will be - and yes, there it was, footage of the tsunami, washing across farmlands in the Japanese coastal countryside.  The buildings looked undamaged, and the fields looked empty.  Was there time to evacuate everyone?  The answer became clear as the helicopter-borne camera followed the advancing wave and, in the near distance, a moving line of cars and trucks became visible.  Did the people in those vehicles know that death was coming?  Were they racing away from it, or just going from one place to another, assuming the worst of the earthquake had  passed?  While I watched the camera never followed the wave front right up to those cars.  Each car, each truck, had at least one living person it it.  If the tsunami reached those vehicles, each person in them would almost certainly be dead in the near future as a consequence.

The image changed to a factory of some sort, maybe a refinery.  Great spherical tanks close to each other, some burning spectacularly.  Occasionally the orange glow of the fire would flare up as, I suppose, another tank exploded.

I watched.  I dozed.  I woke at one point to the sound of the video shot within an office building as the quake hit.  At another point I awoke to something else: I didn't know what it was, but I knew I had programmed myself to get up when I heard it.  It wasn't an alarm.  It was...nothing?  Ah, yes.  Nothing.  The sound of the dryer stopping.  Another load of towels ready to change out.

I went into the flooded part of the basement.  I had had the pumps switched off, and the water had re-accumulated.  The towels I had on the floor were completely saturated.  I had maybe a quarter of an inch of water at the deepest parts.

It was nothing.  A little pumping, some towels, some quick mopping with bleachy water, and everything would be fine.  I had just watched a wall of water destroying houses and snuffing out lives as it rolled across Japan.  I had no worries.