Above is a screencap of the front page of this morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, taken this morning around 7. The death toll is now in the 100s. And likely to rise much higher. An 8.9 quake is one of the worst ever recorded in the world and the worst ever in Japan. If I remember right the Seattle transit tunnel is built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake. I would not want to be in the bus tunnel or one of its stations should an 8.9 earthquake occur.
I learned Japan had had a bad quake and tsunami when I read the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this morning. As we learned recently, from Anonymous, if the Star-Telegram is not reporting it, it isn't news. The Star-Telegram had the Japan quake news on the lower half of their front page. This struck me as odd.
Below is the screencap with the Japan quake/tsunami news from the front page of the Star-Telegram.
I thought maybe the low key way the Star-Telegram was reporting this major disaster, so differently than the Seattle P-I, might have been due to the fact that Seattle is a Pacific Rim city, in the path of the incoming tsunami, with a lot of trade with Japan coming in and out of the Port of Seattle, while Fort Worth is a long ways from the Pacific Ocean with little trade coming or going with Japan.
And then I went to the Dallas Morning News. Dallas is also landlocked and a long ways from the Pacific Ocean. Dallas likely does a little more trade with Japan than Fort Worth does, which may account for the more prominent BIG NEWS way the Dallas Morning News reported the Japan quake, as you can see below.
That is one scary looking tsunami in the picture from the Dallas Morning News. When I heard on the radio that tsunamis were hitting Hawaii I turned on the TV. There was live video of the beach by Diamond Head in Honolulu. But it was dark in Hawaii, you really could not see anything. The talking head described the water receding and the first tsunami flowing in. As he described that the water was receding again, but you could not see it.
I've got a bad feeling this is going to end up being one of the worst natural disasters ever.
