Five years ago today a tsunami hit the east coast of Japan. It was a Friday. The next day, Saturday, I had just driven my car out of the gate. I was going to pick up a friend and head into the mountains for the last of the snow. I climbed out to close the gate, and was about to turn my mobile off when it rang.
“Can you come in to work tonight?”
As I climbed back into the car I heard the news about the explosion at the Fukushima reactor.
For the next few months I spent several days and nights working in the emergency room. During the nights one of the TVs would be tuned to one of the broadcasts from Japan. It was a strange contrast – being at the center of the interest in the reactor problems and at the same time watching what was going on all over Japan – news that hardly ever got reported in the West.
I remember watching a story about a woman who carried her mother on her back to safety for three days, with nothing to eat except half a biscuit each. I remember the school halls filled with people who had no homes left, and the problems with DVT because of the difficult living conditions.
Early on I emailed a friend in Japan to check on her but got no reply. I looked up her address and discovered it was right in the middle of the worst hit area. No email, no home phone, no work phone, no mobile phone. How do you find out if they are okay? It’s nice having Google Connect to find lost family – but with no internet? This was the situation with so many people in Japan – with no way of finding people they loved (still today there are over 2000 missing). It took more than a week before I got a message through via another friend and got an emailed photo of a partially destroyed office building with a message that it was one of the better buildings.
Japan Today later reported there were around 300,000 people living in shelters, 50,000 of them because of the nuclear exclusion zone two years after the disaster. The more I watched the way Japan responded the more amazed I was at the strength of the people. I wondered how many countries could cope with a disaster of this magnitude. I was left with a deep admiration for the people of Japan.
Today there has been a statement by the head of the UN about our need to learn. I agree. We have become so reliant on a complex infrastructure that a major disaster risks sending regions back hundreds of years. Concepts like just-in-time and economy of scale are seldom questioned. If we can’t order our just-in-time goods because of an infrastructure crash then how do we get them?
Economics of scale is perhaps the one concept that concerns me most as a result of Fukushima. Think about building a dam to provide drinking water. If you build 20 dams with lakes 1m deep it will cost more than one big dam with a bigger 10m deep lake. But think about the effect of a large earthquake – you are less likely to destroy all 20 dams than the one big dam. And I would rather have a 1m flood than a 10m flood. Or perhaps think of the problem rescuing people on top of the world trade buildings.
As we build bigger we save money – partly because we find a way of saying an emergency will never occur because we have built it so safe – that way we don’t need to pay to enhance our emergency services.
I saw an interesting change in the attitude of some emergency planners in Japan. While they still worked at reducing the chance of an emergency they then went on and asked the tough question “Okay, if we are wrong and it does happen what will we do?” I have come to the view that there are some accidents that our society cannot tolerate, and perhaps we should not accept the risk that our safety cases are wrong if they would be the outcome.
Had the wind direction been different during the release from the Fukushima reactors there would have been a possibility that the resulting panic in the Tokyo area would have pushed their economy over the edge – and sent a financial tsunami to the rest of the world.
Today the UK is planning to build very safe larger reactors to replace the smaller ones that have just shut down. I think we need to learn from Fukushima and ask the question “But what if an accident did happen?”
I remember a story about a tower built in a place called Babel.