How Does the Disaster in Japan Compare

Our experience as an organization has been with hurricanes, localized flooding, and river flooding. Our partner organization, Hilltop Rescue has done some wild fire response. As devastating as these events have been, we are fairly well prepared with what to expect. I propose, however, that faith based organizations, informal relief organizations like ours, and even the big government supported organizations have a long way to go to prepare for what has happened in Japan.

The scale and diversity of challenges in Northern Japan is beginning to be illustrated in this current CNN lead story:

• The official death toll, rising every few hours, reached 1,886 on Monday [3/14/11]. But that didn't account for thousands of bodies Japan's Kyodo News said had been found in the hard-hit Miyagi Prefecture on Japan's northeast coast.
• At least 2,369 people were missing Monday, the National Police Agency said, and the number of dead is expected to go up as rescuers reach more hard-hit areas.
• Public broadcaster NHK reported that 450,000 people were living in shelters.
• "It's just adding insult to injury," said Ryan McDonald, an American living in Kitakata, about 60 miles west of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. "The earthquake was horrible. Then The tsunami was horrible. And that's not enough. Now there's a nuclear fear."
• The town of Minami Sanriku -- about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Pacific Ocean -- had morphed into a massive pile of wood that used to house 20,000 residents.
• About 15,000 people have been rescued, Kyodo News reported Monday, citing Prime Minister Nato Kan. Among them was Hiromitsu Shinkawa, a 60-year-old man from Minami Soma who was swept away with his house, Kyodo said. A Japanese destroyer found him floating 9 miles off Fukushima Prefecture

This is all very disheartening to me. It seems the bar to measure what constitutes a disaster keeps rising over the last decade. Each new worst-case-scenario is increasingly more extravagant than the last. The fear I have for what God may be preparing us for with our relief work is rising with each of these events.

The best quote I've seen applicable to this is from someone I am acquainted with from my gridSMART cybersecurity work at AEP. As Andy Bochman of IBM said "Good work rarely gets done in the fetal position."

We have work to do in analyzing this present crisis, even if we aren't applying it directly right now. How would we respond to a similar earthquake in California where "63,000 buildings had been damaged, more than 6,000 of them obliterated?" How would we respond to a tsunami, most likely in Oregon or Washington State, but anywhere along the West coast where all structures within 20 feet of sea level, miles inland are washed away with only minutes notice if any? How would we respond to a similar cascading failure of nuclear reactor control systems that could happen nearly anywhere in our country including Ohio? And how would we respond to all of them simultaneously as is required right now in Japan?

I don't have the answers. All of us thinking through these questions and working together to find answers, however, could be of tremendous benefit if our nation were confronted with similar catastrophes.

Your thoughts? How do we function as His hands and feet to victims of so extraordinary a circumstance as this is shaping up to be?

Servants Unite!
John McGuire
servantsunite.blogspot.com