Wave expected on the east coast (US) in the next 15 to 45 mins

Massive fires now...all the debris is igniting. I have a live feed from NHK. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. I was watching a life feed and 12 people were trying to outrun the debris....they didn't make it.

We have a lot of Japanese nationals at my worksite. Has to be hard on them.

Watching the coverage on several news feeds right now. The damage is almost beyond comprehension.

Just read this and not to take away from the damage and suffering in the recent Christchurch earthquake. The earthquake in Japan really puts the scale of it into perspective...

The quake was nearly 8,000 times stronger than one that struck New Zealand late last month, devastating the city of Christchurch.

Msnbc website link

Did people not have enough time to evacuate or do they not have a warning system set up there ?

Really?

Why? (and who says so?)

Japan has the most advanced early-warning and mass-alerting system on the planet. The sirens were sounding, but as you can see from the videos, the speed of the water was far higher than anyone could get away, excepting by air. This is not a scale that humans can manage. If you saw the video of the massive wave pushing a pile of flaming debris through farms and buildings, you'd see that there simply isn't any way to get away fast enough.

The quake was close to the shore, shallow, vast in size, and so powerful that even if you had 30 minutes warning, you would not have been able to get away.

You can't outrun this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4w27IczOTk

Same here. I have inlaws living outside of Tokyo.

First, if anyone finds any long-length news footage from Japan - please post a link here. It seems that all we are getting in the USA is chopped up parts of news footage from Japan. Just enough to be sensationalistic -but not enough facts. I was watching video of the large tsunami wave that was speading through the city of Iwanuma - but the video cut out before we could see what happened to cars and trucks driving on a road (right in front of the wave). So please post links to longer media footage from Japan - if you find any.

I find myself also wondering about the tsunami sirens in Japan - how good was the automatic warning? If the earthquake was about 100 miles off the coast, that should have given the emegerncy system about 10 minutes lead time (100 miles divided by a tsunami speed of 600 miles per hour = 10 mins). Maybe somewhat less time, depending upon coastline and the fault lines. But still enough time for the sirens to trigger, and also emergency messages to go out over the radio. Did that happen effectively?

other Pete

Personally, I find that particular video clip to be the most chilling of the ones they keep showing on the news. In most of these tsunami clips, you never know if there are people inside these cars or buildings that get swept away, but in the last 15 seconds of that particular clip, in the upper right, you can see a string of cars racing along that road so you know for a fact that there are people in those vehicles trying to get away as the water is churning towards them.