Tsunami

A salvage company Wednesday made the first cuts into a 165-ton Japanese dock that ripped from its moorings during last year's tsunami and washed onto an Oregon beach in June.  Think of the dock's demolition as a concrete pound cake being sliced with a cable instead of a knife. The crew will cut the 66-foot dock into five pieces and lift the chunks onto flatbed trucks for removal, officials said. A blue-painted ocean wave mural that appeared this week on one section of the dock will be preserved for a memorial in honor of the March 2011 victims of the earthquake and tsunami off Japan.

SEATTLE -- The 65-foot-long floating dock that washed up in central Oregon last week from last year's  tsunami in Japan was surprising enough. What proved stunning to scientists who rushed down to examine it was the cargo: About 2 tons of living sea creatures, some of which could devastate local sea life populations. “There was a huge amount of stuff. They were very healthy, very reproductive. And included in the list of species that we could identify were some very, very bad characters that we really are afraid of having here - so yes, this really is a horrible thing,” said John Chapman of Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center.

The search for debris from the Japanese tsunami - already making landfall in Canada, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest - has begun in earnest in Southern California. Staffers for the environmental group Heal the Bay began systematic surveys Friday of the Los Angeles County coastline, searching for objects that may have been dragged to sea by tsunami waves that devastated Japan more than a year ago. But if the first day of patrolling the kelp-strewn cobblestones of Malaga Cove was any indication, the debris that has drifted across the Pacific to the West Coast - and so far has included a soccer ball, a motorcycle and a 66-foot-long dock - has yet to hit Southern California.

SEATTLE - Authorities have confirmed that a 66-foot-long dock that floated onto a beach near Newport, Ore., this week came from Japan - the latest in a growing wave of debris from the earthquake and tsunami that ripped through the Japanese coast in March 2011. The Japanese Consulate in Portland confirmed Wednesday that the large floating pier originated at the port of Misawa in northern Japan, and from there appears to have drifted across the Pacific to where it was first spotted Monday on Agate Beach, about a mile north of Newport.

Monthly U.S. sales from Toyota shot up 87% year-over-year as the company rebounded from the earthquake and tsunami that hammered Japanese factories and slowed production last year. U.S. sales by Toyota in May totaled 202,973 units in May. This was in part because of last year's slowdown in production because of the disasters that hit Japan. “Last year, the earthquakes hit in March, and May is when everything started to tank,” said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst at Edmunds, an automotive information company in Santa Monica.

For months, West Coast residents have been bracing for an onslaught of items drifting toward us since last spring's tsunami in northeastern Japan, which swept apartment buildings, cars, even entire villages, into the sea. Now we are seeing the first trickle of that debris. A ghost ship arrived in the Gulf of Alaska this spring. A rusting Harley Davidson from Miyagi prefecture was discovered on a remote beach in British Columbia. A soccer ball found on an Alaskan island and marked with a personal message was returned to its delighted teenage owner in the tsunami-devastated town of Rikuzentakata.

Jeff Larson has seen just about everything wash up on the shores of Santa Cruz: bottles, toys, shotgun shells, busted surfboards and fishing floats that looked like they had bobbed across the Pacific. When surging water driven by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan tore apart his city's harbor, he was there to scoop up the splintered docks and broken boats that were heaved onto the sand. Now, more than a year after the catastrophe in Japan, Larson and fellow beachcombers up and down the West Coast are awaiting the flotsam that was set on a eastward course by the destructive surge of water.

The Times' April 18 editorial, “ Tsunami alert: Don't cut that program ,” raises awareness of some unwelcome proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's tsunami program. The cuts, which amount to $4.6 million, would affect two important components of the national program. The Times' primary concern is with the smaller of the two reductions, a $1-million hit to the array of buoys in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans that detects tsunamis. The much-larger $3.6-million cut to the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program, or NTHMP, concerns The Times less.

After last week's earthquake in the Indian Ocean, people in Indonesia responded far differently than they had seven years earlier, after another major quake: They evacuated low coastal areas to escape a possible tsunami. As it turned out, there were no killer tidal surges for various reasons, including the type of earth movement involved. Still, the response was a welcome improvement. The 2004 earthquake and tsunami killed close to 200,000 people in Southeast Asia; many of those victims had no idea of the impending danger.

A Japanese "ghost ship" that has haunted the open seas since it was set adrift by last year's devastating tsunami has finally found a resting place -- on the ocean floor. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter opened cannon fire on the vessel Thursday, sinking it about 180 miles west of Alaska's southeast coast and in waters more than 6,000 feet deep. A column of smoke could be seen rising from the 164-foot Ryou-Un Maru as the Coast Guard began its assault. It took about four hours for the ship to vanish from sight, Chief Petty Officer Kip Wadlow told the Associated Press.