by Nicasio Angelo Agustin
Last week, the world reeled with shock as Japan experienced its strongest earthquake in recorded history. The tsunami that followed caused widespread anxiety in numerous Pacific nations. In the end, the waves travelled harmlessly mainly eastward to Hawaii and the west coast of the United States.
And the worst is yet to come. Millions of Japanese wonder how long their water and food supplies will last. Another week…a month…who knows?
And there is the specter of continuing power outages, nuclear meltdown, the threat of radiation spreading through the atmosphere and affecting not only other Japanese cities but other nations as well, fears of the health effects of environmental contamination years from now, questions of where to obtain massive resources needed for rebuilding devastated coastal areas. That will take time along with the rebuilding of the spirit and confidence that will enable the Japanese nation to return to normal. Of course the magnitude of the problem is not in the scale of what happened in August of 1945—remember HIroshima and Nagasaki? But it still is a tragedy of massive proportions.
Suddenly, the premier status of Japan in terms of disaster preparedness has proven once again that man is helpless in the face of nature’s fury unleashed. Today, the richest nation in Asia is struggling to get regain its wits while the rest of the world watches with bated breath.
To the cynics and naysayers who had a field day declaring that Japan’s disaster management programs were a failure, it has to be made clear that such programs are not designed to prevent disasters from happening but are put in place primarily to lessen the impact of natural hazards to life and property.
Japan is the most seismically active nation in the world – this, coupled with the fact that most of the country is composed of rugged terrain, means that there is actually a very limited area where built-up types of development can be established. Tokyo is a classic example of the implications of having limited land: a proliferation of very densely populated cities where the only way to build is up.
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake like that which hit Japan last week will no doubt almost always spell disaster. But we have to give credit to stringent Japanese building code that minimal structural damage was noted despite nature’s earth-shaking power. The relatively limited damage was mostly due to ground ruptures, meaning, the structures that were affected were those that were directly on top of the fault line. Office buildings, housing thousands of workers, swayed in the way they were designed to sway. The simple detail of strict compliance by builders and developers to the building code meant that hundreds of thousands of lives were spared.
But in last week’s tragedy, it was the tsunami that was the real killer. Less than an hour after the quake struck waves three-storeys high racing shoreward with the speed of express trains caught thousands of people unprepared to get out of harm’s way. As of this writing over three thousand have been confirmed dead and about eight thousand remain missing even as the search continues. Japan has always been fastidious in its system of massive evacuation for such an event, no matter how unimaginable. A friend of mine who used to work in Japan shared that their company conducted regular evacuation drills, even if they were located 200 kilometers inland at the foot of a mountain.
It takes a special kind of people to live in the most seismically active nation in the world. It needs a people of discipline to cope with tragedy. These traits do not point to a higher, esoteric construct – these traits are needed simply so that insanity, chaos and the breakdown of the social order does not happen when we are reminded that we are mere transients on this planet. With these traits, I know that Japan will be able to surpass even its nuclear crisis and make the most out of living on the most seismically active nation on the planet. My prayers are with them.
The Philippines, by the way, is the second most seismically active country on earth.
Feel free to send your comments to nic_agustin@yahoo.com.
