Word: kobe
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...country's worst earthquake in more than 70 years. The jolt that hit Kobe (pop. 1.5 million) just before dawn on Tuesday measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. The numbers alone told the chilling story: some 5,000 confirmed dead, 200 still missing, 25,000 injured, 300,000 homeless. As exhausted relief workers sifted through the rubble of what was once the country's second busiest port, survivors waited stoically in line for hours for a small bottle of water and a fist-size ball of rice. Offers of help came from all over the world, and as each...
...disaster on the scale of the Japan earthquake is a human tragedy, but for journalists it also becomes a mundane problem of logistics. When the first reports came in from Kobe last Tuesday, Tokyo bureau chief Edward Desmond dispatched reporter Irene Kunii to the scene. As the death toll rose by dozens an hour, Desmond packed extra sweaters and computer batteries and headed south himself, with photographer Greg Davis and interpreter Yoshihiko Asai. They could fly only as close as Osaka, where roads were clogged with relief-effort vehicles and people hoping to rescue family members...
From there it was a matter of improvisation--persuading someone to drive them toward Kobe, then stopping at the suburb of Nishinomiya, where damage was appalling. In Kobe, Kunii had to cover neighborhoods on foot, masking her mouth from smoke and fumes that burned the throat. One night she took shelter on the concrete floor of a school when the temperature was below freezing. Finally she was able to borrow a bicycle. The owner's stipulation: it must eventually be passed on to another needy person. When she left for Tokyo, Kunii bequeathed it to an arriving German correspondent, wishing...
...textbook on the essential lessons of the Kobe earthquake and the one that struck the Northridge section of Los Angeles on the same date a year earlier would read something like this...
...source of the devastating 1923 temblor that killed 143,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama. American scientists have kept a close watch on the San Andreas fault that runs for 650 miles through California from north of San Francisco nearly to the Mexican border. But the Kobe and Northridge quakes occurred not along these major inter-plate faults--cracks where continent-size plates grind against one another--but on intra-plate faults that spiderweb a single giant plate...