Quake Short Notes

Short notes:

• The situation remains desperate for the hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the quake and tsunami-stricken areas. Over a million households lack water, and millions lack electricity and heat. Over one hundred thousand soldiers and other rescue personnel are working there but progress is slow. The problem really is the sheer scale - the area hardest hit by the tsunami is around 700 kilometers long and up to 10 kilometers inland, but there's extensive quake damage outside that zone too. Many roads and rail lines were heavily damaged so it was simply not possible to reach many areas with substantial supplies.
  
  Some roads and rail lines have been repaired now and help is coming in, but people are still dying in the shelters and hospitals, dying from the cold, dying from lack of medical care, or dying from stress and deprivation. More help is needed, and will be needed for months ahead. If you can help in any way, please do.



• Japanese police is reportedly investigating Tokyo Electric, Japans largest electricity company and the owner and operator of the nuclear power plant. The company has a sordid history of covering up accidents and falsifying safety reports. They were very slow with information this time around - reportedly, prime minister Kan exploded a couple of days after the quake when the government got progress reports faster from NHK than from the company itself, and that's apparently what led to creating a "joint" task force that in reality is completely controlled by the government.
  
  BBC stated that Tokyo Electric was unwilling to pump seawater at first, since it would irreparably damage the reactors. That may sound damning, but the devil is in the details. It's not self-evident that using sea water earlier would have improved the course of the accident. The damage may make it more difficult to restart the main pumps - and getting them running again is and remains the only way to permanently shut the reactors down. And of course, TEPCO and the Kanto area needs the power; if there was a feasible way to avoid years of reduced capacity it may well have been a prudent approach.
  
  What we've seen so far is really questionable judgement calls and bad information handling. It will be very interesting to see what made the police decide a criminal investigation is in order. Whether anything comes of it or not, I'd not want to be a TEPCO shareholder right now.



• Sweden, like most other European countries, sent chartered passenger aircraft to evacuate citizens. We are around 700-900 or so in Japan¹, and they sent not one but two airplanes with 250-seat capacity. One airplane brought 1 (one) person back to Stockholm. The other brought 13 people to Bangkok in Thailand. Meanwhile, regular flights are readily available from and to all major Japanese airports for anybody that needs to leave.
  
  The Swedish authorities do not seem terribly well informed; many of their recommendations right now seem to have precious little connection to reality. People living here, on the other hand, do have good first-hand information and can make better judgement calls on what to do. In reality, most of Japan is and will remain unaffected by the quake and the nuclear accident. Sweden could have booked rooms for everybody at hotels in Kansai or Kyushu for a fraction of the cost of chartering aircraft to bring people halfway across the world.
  
  Sending airplanes is of course a political decision as much as a safety one. The government may well realize it's unnecessary, but the public - fed hysterical misinformation for a week or more - does not, and they'd get a storm of criticism if they didn't make the gesture. Of course, with only a handful of people taking them up on the offer they'll be pummelled for sending unneeded aircraft instead. Damned if you do, damned if you don't - but that's what you sign up for when you become a politician.



• National politics have been mostly absent so far, but has reared its head again. I haven't bothered to follow it but I understand the ruling and opposition parties are already trying to spin things for an upcoming election. Kan offered the opposition seats in a unity cabinet, but they refused. Shrewd move; it'd have made passing budget bills much easier, and would have assign both credit and blame to the opposition as well as the DPJ. By refusing, the opposition looks a little unhelpful, and they've had to bend over backwards to promise to pass any disaster-related bills uncontested, even as they accuse (fairly or not I have no idea) the government of using the disaster to move unrelated legislation through the upper house.
  
  The average mental age in the diet is still five or so, in other words, and there's no sign that this disaster will improve anything on that front.

I'm probably going to stop comment further on the quake, the tsunami and the nuclear accident unless something important happens. There are many more, and much better, sources of information out there, and I'm neither an expert; nor, thankfully, have we any personal experience of these events to share. Our personal impact has been completely trivial: A few barely noticeable aftershocks; a computer facility I use in Wako-shi northwest of Tokyo is mostly unavailable in order to save energy; and there's a lack of large batteries and other such items in the stores, as they're being sent to people that really need them.

So if you're a friend or relative you have no need at all to worry about us. If you want good, level-headed information there's plenty of sources out there - BBC runs a pretty good stream here. If you want to help, please consider a donation to the Japanese Red Cross directly, or via Google.

#1 The embassy doesn't seem to do a very good job of keeping track of its citizens. I remember I wanted to register at the embassy when I came here - just a phone and address so they could contact me. Instead I got a photocopied multi-page questionnaire with personal and irrelevant questions I was supposed to fill in by hand and send back by post to Tokyo. It went straight in the trash and I forgot all about it. I have no idea if the embassy knows (in the record-keeping and disaster management sense) if I live in Japan or not.