Japanese city covered in mysterious foam after earthquake

i dont think its a fire truck doing it, the foam looks to be all over the place not isolated.

it could be some sort of fire suppression chemical is leaking from damaged pipes and flooding the streets reacting with water.

I hope that is not an omen of some sort

a reply to: TrueAmerican

As another poster mentioned, it is likely some kind of sewage type stuff.

I've seen similar looking stuff on the shores of Lake Ontario near the waste management plant no less..that's when I realized a while back just how polluted that lake is.

Dead mermaids :p

a reply to: reldra


Sorry, but "raw, untreated sewage" is a lot of discolored water, usually yellowish, with bits of paper and chunks of brown stuff floating in it. (Sorry, I have no pictures handy, but surely, you can imagine..?

No where is there raw sewage that develops tons of foam. That feature would require some very potent, outside chemical agent. Perhaps it is a component of treating sewage that was over-applied by many multiple amounts. More than likely, it is evidence of a chemical that was pumped into the ground to get rid of it and now it has literally come to light.

From what I can gather this has already been explained. There is a large building in the immediate area which was damaged by the quake and their fire suppression system emptied out into the surrounding streets.

This is not a big mystery, this was clearly a very localized event and not witnessed anywhere else, this makes it clear that it was more plausibly caused by a single rupture in a single place of a positioned product and not some mysterious natural phenomena we haven't seen before.

a reply to: Rocker2013

Yes, this is in the Japanese news now. The building is a pachinko parlor. I don't think the building was damaged, but rather just the foam system, which is underground. Apparently the same thing happened outside a Donki in Tokyo, and people are saying the maker of this system just did a poor job.

a reply to: MoreInterior

I did think that's what this was when I saw it, it was too pure looking to be anything natural and definitely didn't appear to be sewage. My initial thought was that it was perhaps a chemical pipeline between buildings, but the fire suppression system definitely makes more sense.

a reply to: TrueAmerican

There have been so many foam incidents in the last years. Example
Astonishing! "FOAM TSUNAMI" Strike - CHINA 50 ft High - Much PANIC Sep.30,2012

a reply to: TrueAmerican

Wow!!! I live here and I haven't seen any comments or news about this, mind you I was at the Beach in the country side at the time of the quakes , but still no one remarked on it through social media, I had to find this out from folks probably living X-thousands of miles from the event...the internet and ATS is amazing like that..thanks..

Could it be some sort of flubber?

So we're supposed to be stupid enough to believe that raw sewage can somehow turn completely white and foam up?? Really? Really?? Come on now!!!!

a reply to: cj6

Is the foam itself raw sewage? No I doubt that. But ca the foam result from raw sewage, that is possible, but we would have to discover what process was involved in this specific case. This phenomenon is quite common in the reef aquarium hobby, from a device known as a protein skimmer. What happens is that water goes through the skimmer, and an airstone causes the dissolved organic matter present in the water to bubble out into a collection chamber as a foam. Basically an additional sewage treatment for your aquarium in addition to the normal filter.



It could be possible that something with pressurized air is underground inside the raw sewage, and the air is basically causing the dissolved organic matter to foam out through the streets. The Ocean does it all day, and thats why we frequently see small bits of foam at the shoreline on the beach as the waves crash. The impact of the wave fills sand with water, forcing air to escape, which foams out the D.O.M. This can also happen on a large scale when if there was a recent mass die off of marine life near some coastal cities, causing Tsunamis of foam to engulf their shoreline.





Situations like this may be related to certain species of squid who mate and the die off in mass by the hundreds of thousands. I have a theory that the two are related somehow. The squid die-offs after mating and the huge approach of massive foam washes from the coast.