Preparing For Two Years of Rolling Blackouts [Japan Quake]

Late last year when I was busily planning my new house, I didn’t give too much thought to earthquakes. Don’t get me wrong, it was planned to stand up to a big one – the building code in the little earthquake-prone nation that has become my home is amongst the strictest in the world. In videos of the Fukushima and Miyagi prefecture you can see plenty of recently built houses that look like nothing happened – mine is one of those.

Beneath the foundations I have thirty-three 600 mm wide concrete and steel pilons connecting the foundations to the bedrock three meters underground – stilts just in case the ground beneath the home liquefies. I also planned it to protect us from searing summers that hit over 40C and cold winters that can get as low as -10C. The

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