After the Shaking stops, or What is Also Hard About Earthquakes
Date: March 11, 2011. Local time, approximately 14:46 in the afternoon. What: 9.1 Magnitude megathrust earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan, near the Tohoku region.
I was there. The shaking lasted about 5, 6 minutes. Even after getting everyone outside, there were aftershocks 7.5, 7.6, 7.9 afterwards, some feeling stronger than the initial quake because the aftershocks occurred closer to where I was.
Much has been written by people who experienced the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant will be studied for decades to come. What I feel is often left out, though, is what happened after the shaking and tsunami have subsided. People talk about the magnitude of the quake, the size of the tsunamis, and the immediate destruction as a result, but I feel like those are the actors and stage pieces on the story. What's missing is the background, the context, the “scenery” where all those actors and set pieces are set against. An actor standing with a broken door in front of an old abandoned house has a different meaning than if they were standing in front of a junkyard backdrop.
Seeing and hearing the latest earthquake to hit Japan on January 1, 2024, I'm reminded how much this background gets taken for granted or even ignored by those trying to help or understand. I don't want that to happen. To illustrate my point, I will share what I think is important background that is often missing from the disaster I personally experienced on and after March 11, 2011.
Weather
It was cold. Many places had below-freezing temperatures at night. Electricity was out throughout huge regions of the affected area so using built-in heating was impossible for many. Not only was it difficult to move around due to debris and destroyed infrastructure, fighting to stay warm was an additional stress that affected people disproportionately. Huddling in a partially damaged home with no lights or heat and no indication when it would be restored (some homes likely did not get full electricity even after power was restored due to damage to the home's internal structures) made a stressful situation even worse.
Fuel
Gasoline stations require electricity to pump fuel into vehicles. It doesn't matter how much fuel they still have, if there are no means to transfer it to cars trying to move goods and supplies within the affected areas, they might as well not exist. Driving to areas that still had electricity required driving for sometimes 30 minutes one way, assuming those gasoline stations still had fuel to sell.
Water
Treatment plants require electricity as well. Some towns suffered so much damage to key machinery that for many weeks after the initial earthquake, many people still had to rely on water distribution trucks that would use loudspeakers to announce where they were going to be on a given day.
Isolation
Cell phone towers have battery backups, but even those give out after many hours. You can't use the normal technology distractions to try to take your mind off the situation at hand. Think about it now: if you lost ALL access to the internet for 3 weeks and could not easily travel to a place that had internet, all while trying to figure out how best to get electricity, food, water, light, and heat, what distractions do you have to help deal with the stress?
Bringing the full picture into view
Standing in front of a broken sewer line takes on a much different meaning when there is fallen snow around. Seeing a gaping hole in the road means something different when there are gaping holes every hundred meters instead of surrounded by construction zone hazard tape.
The shaking has stopped. The initial destruction is over. Fear, anger, apprehension, confusion now all give way to everything else that was always there, but so often ignored: our lives are not lived in a vacuum. I don't want to forget about the things that weren't destroyed but still dictate how we can rise and overcome the challenges of the disaster. Sometimes, it's important to take our eyes off the actors speaking on the stage to look at the curtains behind them. What we see makes a world of difference.
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