Power out

I've put pictures of Tokyo's earthquake experience (as seen from my angle) on the travel map. It's nothing graphic like the news coverage; it's just pictures of people being inconvenienced. I'm trying to show how out of the ordinary things are at the moment.

Tokyo has a huge power shortage at the moment. Last post I understated how scarce electricity is now that three power plants are down. It'll be a while until this improves, as one of those plants had an explosion and a near-meltdown this afternoon. I recall reading that they had to flood one of the plant's reactor with seawater to cool the thing down.

The rotating blackouts aren't the only form of power conservation; some of the trains are also down. I don't know if this is due to malfuntion or if it's on purpose. The fact of the matter is that the most important element of Tokyo's infastructure was running at a fraction of its normal capacity (its normal capacity being barely sufficient even at the best of times). Here's what it looked like at Shinjuku station:

At first glance, there's nothing out of the ordinary here for 9:30am. What you can't see easily is that most of these people are in the same queue due to most trains not running. This is what the JR train yard looked like just after peak rush hour:

 

This was Kuriko's train. Mine was no better. Mine arrived at less than half the frequency and the queue, while not quite as long, was long and slow enough that I chose to wait it out as opposed to lining up. In retrospect this was kind of stupid and it made me super late for work.

Being late wasn't so detrimental, though, as work didn't really happen today. I arrived to an office full of people checking the news and not saying or doing much. My boss came to me and told me not to make any phone calls, out of respect for the people on the other end. Shortly after that he dismissed the whole office. I was at work for less than half an hour, having spent three hours trying to get there. Tomorrow I'll probably not go in as there's not really anything I can do there without getting on the phone.