Acts of Nature

       LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — People from Los Angeles to Tokyo have been gathering to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan two years ago.

KNX 1070′s Claudia Peschiutta reports a memorial service held on Sunday near Little Tokyo included a panel discussion on how residents in the Southland can prepare for the next major quake.

Displays outside LAPD headquarters recalled the 2011 quake that left 18,000 dead and destroyed 300,000 homes, including a plaque underscoring the ongoing recovery for residents in the Tohoku region of Japan.

Fire officials were on hand to remind the public of what a similar quake could mean for Southern California.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we are earthquake prone in California, but we also could get a tsunami,” Los Angeles County Fire Asst. Chief David Stone said. “We just haven’t had one in a long time.”

Residents were urged to prepare for a number of disaster scenarios, including how to cope for being at least “two weeks on your own”.

“The message for a lot of us needs to be, ‘Be ready for anything’,” said Battalion Chief Larry Collins. “The message used to be 72 hours, but we’ve seen in disasters like [Hurricane] Katrina, even [Hurricane] Sandy recently, that, really, if it’s wiped out your infrastructure, and your electricity grid and your communications, it will be very likely be more than three days before you start getting food, water and other supplies coming in from outside.”

The event also featured an interfaith service including Buddhist monks, a Jewish cantor and Christian representatives.

Residents in Tokyo on Monday, meanwhile, stood in silence at 2:46 p.m., the very moment the magnitude-9.0 quake struck on March 11, 2011, and wiped out entire coastal communities along with triggering a tsunami that caused three reactors to meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.