Tagged: Japanese Tsunami

The Los Angeles-based singer Simone White has a voice like ether. It's sweetly airy and hypnotic. Hearing it can pull you under to a strangely beautiful, glittering world where nothing seems real.

On "In The Water Where The City Ends," from her latest record, Silver Silver, White's voice is at its most haunting as she recalls, in disjointed poetry, the tsunami that devastated Japan's Tohoku region last year.

HONOLULU — Tsunamis generated by the magnitude-9 earthquake in Japan last March dragged 3 million to 4 million tons of debris into the ocean after tearing up Japanese harbors and homes.

Scientists believe ocean currents are carrying some of the lumber, refrigerators, fishing boats and other objects across the Pacific toward the United States.

One to 5 percent of the 1 million to 2 million tons of debris still in the ocean may reach Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon and Washington and British Columbia, said University of Hawaii senior researcher and ocean current expert Nikolai Maximenko.

PORT ANGELES, Wash. — An official from the Japanese consulate in Seattle has visited the home of a Port Angeles man to inspect a large black float he found near Neah Bay to determine if it's some of the first debris from the tsunami that hit Japan last March.