Natural disasters have a way of catching people when they least expect it. The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 hit its citizens as they were about to wind down for the evening. They would have sat down to meals in a few short hours; men, women, and children would have later retired for the night to start a new day. A new day came, but it was filled with destruction as cities and villages were reduced to rubble and had buried people where they stood. Nations began humanitarian efforts that exist more than a year later and will continue indefinitely. A tsunami swept over the coast of Haiti on that day as well, but it's damage was minute in comparison to what Japan has seen in recent days.
I woke up last Friday, March 11, ate breakfast, showered, and got ready to come to the college. As I turned on the television to catch up on the overnight news, I was troubled by what I saw. Breaking news was still coming in, so much of the Western World had yet to understand what had happened, but Japan had suffered an earthquake. I turned off the television and felt a sickening feeling build in my gut. I knew this would be a catastrophe. I kissed my wife goodbye and wished her a good day before I left. As she still lay in bed, I was compelled to tell her what I had seen.
"Japan has hit by an earthquake. 8.9 I think. It's pretty bad."
"Oh no."
"A wave came onto land and wiped away whole towns. It doesn't look good."
As I turned to leave, we expressed our reciprocal, "be safe, I love you," to each other, and I left for the day. When I came home later that evening, I entered the living room to discover she had been glued to the television all day. Nearly seven-hundred kilometres of coastal Japan had suffered a direct hit from the tsunami and there was an untold amount of people unaccounted for. But a man-made threat had entered the arena while I had been away from home. Several nuclear reactors at a Fukushima generating station were severely damaged and clouds laced with radioactivity had dispersed into the air.
I write this one week later and the situation has gone from "worst-case" to whatever can be described beyond that qualifier. Foreign nations are pulling their citizens out of Japan as some of its cities are in survival mode due to rolling blackouts, food shortages, and an exodus of Japanese evacuating out of an area that some say could become the next Chernobyl. It may even be worse. As per usual, the selfishness of stock markets don't take kindly to disaster regions and money is being ripped out of Japan's economy as well. It should be the stuff of filmmaking, but this is real life and death.
I like to set off my posts with an image–something that relates to the content I've written below. There is little I could contribute to the discussion by doing this, so I opted out on this occasion. There's more than enough images of Japan's heartbreak in the public sphere for everyone to see.
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