by David Rubens
May 2011
Main Points
- The events in Japan in March 2011, involving an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, fell exactly within the risk profile of Japan’s disaster management programme, and there were no contributing factors to the disaster that could not or should not have been predicted and accounted for.
- The failures in disaster response management came about through systemic weaknesses that were entirely predictable, and had been identified in previous similar events, including the 1995 Kobe-Hanshin earthquake
- The systemic failures of the Japanese government and disaster management system were not unique to Japan. They reflect almost completely the same weaknesses that were identified in America following Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.
- Japan’s planning and construction laws have clearly made a difference to the ability of large buildings to survive even major earthquakes, and this can be seen as a major success in their long-term earthquake management policy.
- Despite the fact that individual agencies have developed a high-level of expertise and capability (and often have world-class equipment and technology unavailable to other countries, including US), Japan still lacks a unified Disaster Management framework that allows the swift mobilisation of separate agencies under a unified operational command.
- There needs to be a clear distinction made between ‘Major Incidents’ and ‘National Disasters’. They require a different class of response, and as one US FEMA commentator noted, it is no use responding to a Class 5 Disaster with Class 1 frameworks.
- Failures at the tactical and operational level were reflected in, and in many ways caused by, a lack of leadership at the political level. Disaster management on a national level is a political issue, and responsibility for that needs to be accepted by national political leaders, whether in terms of long-term capability preparation or in the immediate post-incident response.
- Despite these failures, there is a clearly-defined development road-map that would allow Japan to use its existing technical, personnel and organisational resources to create an appropriate, effective and integrated unified Disaster Management framework.
- None of the points above are new or unknown. They reflect almost completely the conclusions reached following the 1995 Kobe-Hanshin earthquake and the Hurricane Katrina Congressional Reports. They were fixable then. They are fixable now. If they are not fixed, the same points will undoubtedly be made following the next disaster….
Introduction
The recent incidents in Japan in March 2011, involving a major earthquake followed by a devastating tsunami, have once again offered a dramatic reminder of how quickly the world can throw up situations that challenge the fundamental rules and principles that crisis response managers depend on in developing their most basic response management programmes and procedures. Despite the fact that ‘The Big One’ was an inevitable consequence of Japan’s geographical positioning across major tectonic faults, and that earthquakes and tsunami’s are at the centre of Japanese disaster planning at every level from Cabinet Ministers to local village disaster committees, the truth is that once the disaster hit, there were major failures at every level of the crisis response management system.
Although the scale of crisis that Japan’s earthquake and subsequent tsunami produced was described as unprecedented, the problems of response management that they highlighted reflected similar problems that had been identified in recent previous disaster response programmes across the world, including the 2004 Indian Ocean Christmas Day tsunami (9.2 Richter scale, 231,000 dead), 2010 China Yushu Earthquake (6.9 magnitude, 3,000 fatalities), May 2008 Burma Cyclone Nargis (138,000 fatalities, though it is believed that this was a severe under-estimation), 2005 New Orleans Hurricane Katrina (around 1,900 fatalities) and January 2010 Haiti earthquake (7.1 magnitude, 300,000+ fatalities). Given that the Japanese tragedy, similarly to Hurricane Katrina, took place in an advanced, technologically-enabled nation and was a situation that had had been long predicted and which had been at the center of national disaster response planning for well over 100 years (the Seismology Society of Japan was founded in 1880, twenty-five years before the Seismological Society of America was founded in 1906, following the San Francisco Earthquake and the first professor of seismology chair at Imperial University (Tokyo), Faculty of Science was established in 1886), the question has to be asked as to why government response capability proved to be so ineffective, and whether there are fundamental flaws still existing at the heart of national disaster planning that creates an inevitability of failure when faced with the realities of actual disaster management.
This paper offers an overview of some of the principle issues that were at the heart of Japanese government disaster management planning, and which led to the relative failure of many of its core components.
It will also use some of the lessons learned in other similar disaster response programmes (both inside Japan and in other countries) as a benchmark to measure whether there has been progress made based upon previously learned lessons.
Having had the privilege to be involved in Japan for almost thirty years, this paper is offered in the spirit of Kizuna, friendship in times of hardship, and in the hope that it will make a small contribution to the prevention of similar crisis response management failures in the future.
Note: It became clear very early on in the post-tsunami recovery process that the issues surrounding the breakdown of safety procedures at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations in the immediate earthquake zone were creating an almost unique ‘double whammy’, convoluting the needs to deliver and manage the survivor recovery programme with the equally pressing issues of dealing with a potentially major radiation incident. However, I will leave issues of nuclear safety to the experts, and in this paper will only refer to the problems caused by the nuclear and radiation crisis in as much as they play a part in the more general disaster response programme.
For full version of the Article please visit the link
http://www.davidrubens-associates.com/PDFS/DRA_Japan%20earthquake%20article_7a_.pdf