New House Seems OK
March 13th, 2011
I went to check out the house, and it appears to be perfectly fine–no broken glass, no damaged concrete or plastic, not so much as a cracked tile anywhere. That’s the general result around here. The trains were running normally, with no crowding on the trains. The people who built our house say that they will not be doing more than just a basic visual check with us this Friday, so it’s pretty much up to us to spot any damage that might not be immediately apparent. I’ll probably ask them to turn the gas on in addition to the water, so we can make sure all the lines are holding up OK. Don’t know what else we can do, aside from hiring an engineer, who would be prohibitively expensive and probably not necessary.
I’m no structural engineer but check all doors to see if they open & close correctly.
Check all electrical outlets to confirm polarity and juice.
If earthquake insurance costs a lot you might as well maybe not take it and just save the money instead. . .
That’s great news, Luis.
Whoever designed your new home had earthquake damage in mind. The newer homes in Japan have increasingly higher durability standards. The fact that there were no broken windows gives me confidence in the design.
The other blessing is that the new home was not full of expensive stuff (e.g., furniture, dinnerware, computer equipment) when the earthquake hit. Even if the building sways, you could end up losing cherished items or be struck by falling materials.
That is the only reason I can think of for buying earthquake insurance; but you can always use fasteners/deadbolts to lock things down as a precaution.
Finally, your new home is at a high enough elevation that you do not need to be concerned with tsunami damage, right? So I believe you can put your mind at ease about the safety concerns.
Just an afterthought; you might want to consider any drop in real estate value since the earthquake struck. Natural disasters have a tendency to spook sellers into selling off their property quickly, but I doubt it will have much impact in the greater Tokyo area.
Hibarigaoka is on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musashino_Terrace so there’s no flood problem, being literally in the shadow of Mt Fuji has helped that.
you are correct about the future of real estate perhaps, but not because of selling in Tokyo — Tokyo came out great, and more people might be moving into Tokyo from Tohoku now — but because of the economic hit Japan is going to be taking.
The Japanese lost hundreds of billions of dollars of capital wealth — trucks, boats, bridges, warehouses, roads, schools, etc etc and at the end of the day all Japanese are going to have to pitch in to rebuild the affected area’s fishing plant and civil infrastructure.
Also, they’ve shut down 10 nuclear reactors and are starting rolling blackouts in the entire Kanto area.
It looks like Luis is going to be losing power from 6:20AM to 10AM and 4:50PM to 8:30, and this is not necessarily temporary if they can’t get power generation back up and/or they can’t get consumption down (I’m hoping the latter will work).
Seibu train line is saying:
“However, it may be difficult to come back, please do not go out as much as possible.”
Apparently the last stop on the the Seibu Ikebukuro line is going to be an hour and a half walk away from Hibarigaoka.