Monument Damage News Today

Tokyo right now. are people there, i mean, presumably they have many people in tokyo, might have friends or family members in the areas that were struck by this earthquake. are they able to get in touch with their family and loved ones? >> reporter: well, its very difficult to get in touch with anybody in the area, certainly, but over the past couple hours we actually found it difficult to phone out from here as well. i know there have been some difficulties in tokyo. so certainly the phone line...

Damage. >> in fact, if you look at this picture, it looked like anymore mall day, but look at this picture in northern japan and the damage there is monumental. the known death toll in the hundreds. it is certain to clichmb. that was 8.9 magnitude and that is the strongest earthquake in more than 100 years. water has no business being here, ali. this is debris, cars, houses, just slammingk against the coast and going inland as far as several miles. >> one always wonders if you dont have experien...

Highways and there is a massive aftershock, you have a disaster on top of a disaster, so that the authorities have shutdown all of the highways and raillines have been shutdown, and people cannot get in and out of the city quickly. we should point out that at 3:00 in the morning, normally tokyos rails are not moving, but because they stopped moving at 2:40 or 2:50 in the afternoon, there is all of this backup of people who are still stuck in the city of tokyo trying to get home to the suburbs. w...

If it was 300 miles into the earth, thats 300 miles of padding. were almost 300 miles away. if its only 6, 10, 12 miles deep, theres a lot of shaking going on. thats a violent rattling of that city. >> im just -- were getting more information in, chad. kelly, go ahead with that. there are no tsunami alerts issued as a result of this, but two reactors are in the area of nagano and they continue to operate. everything is okay at this point with the two reactors in the nagano area. no tsunami alert...

News agency. >> about 4 1/2 hours from now. as christine was saying, the airport, narita is not closed for any reason that theres any damage there. they have congestion, theyre trying to get flights out. equivalent of what you might know as a ground stop in the united states. theyre not letting a lot of flights to take off to head to tokyo. there have been cancelations there. hundreds of tweets a minute. next, how japans earthquake and tsunami are dominating social media sites today.

Is some sort of flexible movement where they can get in and out very quickly using helicopters. were hours away from daylight. at this point we still dont know what the devastation is going to be. we can tell you that logistically tokyo is still heavily impacted. people are still trying to cope with the loss of infrastructure in this city. up north, though, rescue crews still trying to get up there, still trying to assess the exact scope of the devastation. >> thats the issue. that a lot of the ...

Welcome. welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. im ali velshi. >> the world is not only watching a historic disaster, much of the world is feeling it as well. >> its been a rough morning in some california harbors. beaches have been closed all night. waves have been higher than normal. so far we havent heard of any damage other than to boats and docks. >> here is where the damage is. northeast japan, monument damage. the known death toll, in the hundreds, and it is c...

Age of the world, is a pin prick. >> in 1995 the kobe earthquake was 7.6 and killed 6,500 people or something like that. in the days after that, they had about 50 aftershocks. they can be very damaging, particularly if -- again, if you hit in areas where your engineering is set up for it, it can minimize damage, but these things, at a much lower magnitude than 8.9, can be very damaging. >> a perfect example is the christchurch earthquake. structures that werent tended to right away ended up coll...

Airport is closed. and narita is opened with some flights out, but mostly because the people are stuck there, and the highways are closed going into the major airports and the railways are closed as well. so you have long lines and people trying to figure out how to get out of to airport, and some flights have been a big ec. $5.5 trillion economy. it is a big global player in the global economy. this is, even ads the human tol is something were focusing on right now, this is a story that will be...