Aftershocks from Sendai: thoughts on a world disaster - David Loftus

It is the fourth day following the stunning natural disaster off the coast of Japan, and the aftershocks—by which I mean the social and economic implications for us, no matter where in the world we live, and the details of the original ’quake and tsunami—roll on.

Since I don’t normally watch television, I might not have known about the event until Friday morning’s newspaper, were it not for Internet social networks. Within a half hour after the tsunami began to steamroller through the communities of Japan’s east coast, I saw the buzz among my Facebook friends and turned on the television Thursday night to catch the live feed. By 10:15 local Pacific time, all the local stations had interrupted normal programming to follow the growing disaster.

I got up the next morning to watch continuing coverage, particularly since I had grown up on the Oregon coast and now live only an hour’s drive from it. Since then I have bounced between Facebook and the television during my free time to keep up with the situation. My Facebook friends pinpoint the best video clips and still photography, where I go whenever local news shows drearily dwell on domestic disturbances and local scams, and (ALWAYS) spends too long on the weather.

The first couple days, like the live coverage of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/01, the lens was mostly too big to allow you to see individual people, to feel their plight, and that made it kind of unreal. The videos of brown and black ooze driving toy houses, boats, and trucks reminded all of us of just another CGI-driven Hollywood thriller. Occasionally you glimpsed a car racing ahead of the dirty flow, like a rat or cockroach scuttling along a kitchen floor when the ceiling light goes on. Not until Sunday night did we begin to see and hear the stories of heartbreak and miniature triumphs—such as the woman describing how she lost her handhold on her daughter, and the 60-year-old man rescued from a rooftop ten miles out to sea. My wife shuddered to think about all the animals whose awful fates we have not yet begun to learn.

Also like other breaking disasters, local news offered the pathetically hilarious entertainment of reporters tripping over their tongues and committing factual errors because the story didn’t unfold like a typical news event, at a pace they could mentally process. They also walked that tightrope of being reassuringly hopeful while simultaneously pricking our fears so we didn’t stop watching altogether: as Friday morning’s surges approached the West Coast of the U.S., anchors and reporters in Portland repeatedly showed us long footage of calm empty beaches, and assured us this was the best thing we could hope for, but adding ominously: “this could change at any time.” Thank goodness the marinas of Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, and Brookings, Oregon cooperated in giving some good video to keep the thrill junkies happy.

Again, like 9/11, but in a different way, the 2011 disaster will likely raise our level of insecurity and might change how we see and do things in the future. Friday, gas prices fell briefly because Japan is the world’s third-largest importer of oil, but in combination with the incipient civil war on the other side of the globe (in Libya), before the weekend was over they were climbing again.

There will be lots of discussion of earthquake and tsunami preparedness, and most of us will say “boy, I ought to put together a disaster pack” . . . and most of us will do nothing. Or we will put a kit partly together, then raid it within the coming year and fail to keep it maintained.

A Japanese-American businessman who had just returned to Portland from Tokyo a few days before the earthquake said on last night’s news that he was proud there hasn’t been a single report of looting in Japan. Although there’s probably been a little of that, too small to make the news radar, things may be different when the West Coast gets hit with its subduction quake and tsunami, I’m afraid. Japanese citizens are used to thinking communally, to following orders, and cooperating with each other, not to mention having been more experienced with and prepared for earthquakes in the first place.

The Japanese also own no handguns and very few rifles, because General Douglas MacArthur banned individual gun ownership during the post-World War II Occupation. The few gun crimes that occur in Japan today, amounting to about 200 a year, mostly involve illegal possession, not the commission of a violent crime. Kansas City, Houston, even Peoria probably suffer more gun crimes and fatalities than the entire nation of Japan. Lucky for the Japanese we Americans were willing to impose government controls with which we have been unwilling to bless ourselves.

The upshot? No matter how intense or light the actual seismic event, survival of our eventual natural disaster will probably be far more unpleasant than it is turning out in Japan. Those of us who prepared with disaster kits may find ourselves looking down the gun barrels of those who didn’t bother and now think we should “share.” Rather than heroic saves and heartwarming cooperation, looting, bullying, and outright murder may be what the rest of us get to hear about on the news, the next time.