Hmmm, is the world still listening to the unfolding catastrophe in Japan?
Fresh headlines top the evening news directing our attention elsewhere. Osama Bin Laden killed… NATO air strikes in Libya… Gaddafi on the run… the Canadian political landscape changes… massive flooding in Manitoba and Louisiana.
In a world where every day seems to bring to light new conflict or suffering, our sensitivities are becoming numbed and our attention span is becoming short. Japan is, after all, old news.
Or is it?
I’ll confess that I have turned my thoughts in other directions. But I came back to the story today to revisit the situation in Japan. Over 15,000 people are confirmed dead. Yes, we’ve heard that figure for awhile and digested it. But the reality is that over 9,000 people are still missing. 115,000 people are still living in evacuation centres.
How long will it be before life returns to some semblance of normal in Japan? Answer: Not anytime soon, considering that:
- 88,873 houses, 3,970 roads, 71 bridges and 20,000 boats/vessels (some of them still sitting on the tops of buildings) were damaged or destroyed
- 520 tons of high-level radioactive water have leaked into the sea
- 20 million tons of debris must be removed. August is the earliest estimate for when the wreckage will be cleared from the roads.
One expert estimates that there is the equivalent of an entire century’s worth of household waste to be dealt with. Mountains of debris on private land may not be cleared for many months or even years.
Care to take a guess at Japan’s emergency supplementary budget for the clean-up and recovery? It is in the neighbourhood of $4.6 billion.
But there is one fact that perhaps tells the story better than any other.
As we all know by now, Japan sits in the “Ring of Fire” – an area dotted with earthquake and volcanic zones. As one article put it, Japan is in a “seismic bull’s-eye”. American and Japanese scientists have concluded that the March 11 quake may have heightened the stress on faults around the “Japan Trench”.
So how long will the aftershock sequence continue? Six months? A year? Not even close. The experts say it will probably go on for a decade. Yes, that’s right – a decade.
I’m not sure that things will ever entirely return to normal in the ravaged coastal areas of Japan. In my earlier post on the subject, the fact that moved Honshu Island 2.5 metres to the east during the quake became my metaphor for the true scale of the catastrophe.
And it remains so.
Human experience has been fundamentally altered in Japan. Let’s not permit ourselves to simply shrug and move on. The news headlines may change every day. But behind the headlines, the struggle to recover will continue in Japan for years to come.
~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.
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Tags: earthquake · Japan · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · tsunamiNo Comments