My cousin and his family live in Tokyo. Thank God they weren't hurt.

The Japanese reactor crisis has an unfortunate parallel with the World Trade Center towers:

The WTC architects took into account that the towers were in proximity to three major airports. So they designed the towers to withstand a direct hit by a 747. But they didn't take into account the effect of fires caused by full fuel loads on the floors' bracing. Evidently Japanese architects built the reactors to withstand a major earthquake. But it looks like they didn't take into account that a 8.9 quake would disable all of the reactors' auxilliary generators, leaving no means to operate pumps to cool the reactor cores.