Monthly Archives: March 2011

When the “Responsible Party” Acts Irresponsibly – update on TEPCO

Posted on by
Reply
The Fukushima 1 NPP

Image via Wikipedia

Update on March 31:  MSNBC evening TV news indicates that the national government in Japan has taken over the TEPCO utility; it is expected that the co. will be nationalized in the near future.

March 30: According to CNN news, the “The president of the embattled utility that owns the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been hospitalized due to “fatigue and stress,” the company said Wednesday.Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Masataka Shimizu was hospitalized Tuesday. The company has not released further details about his condition.”

______________________________________________

In the U.S. we use the term “responsible party” for the private sector entity that owns the facility that causes a hazardous material or technological crisis or disaster.  The relationship between that party and the national government is always a conflicted one — think, for example, of the relationship between the BP Oil Co. and the U.S. government over the deepsea drilling accident in 2010.  Here is the Japanese version of that relationship, as unfolding since the Sendai earthquake and tsunami: Amid Reactor Crisis, Japanese Utility Executive Vanishes, Wash. Post, March 28

In normal times, Masataka Shimizu lives in The Tower, a luxury high-rise in the same upscale Tokyo district as the U.S. Embassy. But he hasn’t been there for more than two weeks, according to a doorman.

The Japanese public hasn’t seen much of him recently either. Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the company that owns a haywire nuclear power plant 150 miles from the capital, is the most invisible — and most reviled —chief executive in Japan.

Vanishing in times of crisis is something of a tradition among Japan’s industrial and political elite. During Toyota’s recall debacle last year, the carmaker’s chief also went AWOL. “It is very, very sad, but this is normal in Japan,” saidYasushi Hirai, the chief editor of Shyukan Kinyobi, a weekly news magazine.

But the huge scale of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi and mounting anger at Tepco’s obfuscations have put unprecedented strain on the Japanese establishment’s preference for invisible crisis management. And the Internet has helped erode Japan’s deferential norms and given voice to those who want more than a contrite bow.

Shimizu’s vanishing act “is not so much extremely strange as inexcusable,” said Takeo Nishioka, the chairman of the upper house of Japan’s Diet, or parliament.

Presently, the public expects more responsible and transparent actions from corporate executives.  And thanks to digital media the drama unfolds publicly, in view of the readers and viewers worldwide.

Apparently, the public in Japan is quite fed up with both the Prime Minister and with the President of TEMCO.  Various news services today have accounts of dissatisfaction with the performance of both executives. Now that a few weeks have past, and there has been time to appraise the performance of both leaders, the public finds them wanting.

Related Articles

Another Form of Relocation – – Decentralization

Posted on by
Reply
From top left: Shinjuku, Tokyo Tower, Rainbow ...

Image via Wikipedia

It appears as if recovery planners in Japan are considering a wide array of possible options for rebuilding after the Sendai disasters.  One aspect of this is to review the vulnerability and risks in Tokyo.  See Kan Told to Decentralize Japan as Aide Says ‘Big One’ May , Annihilate Tokyo, Bloomberg News, March 27, 2011.  Given the fact that Tokyo is the nation’s business, financial, and political capital, it seems like a good idea to decentralize these activities. Additionally, the rural areas recently devastated need some new forms of commercial and other job-generating activities.

Takayoshi Igarashi has spent much of his career railing against Japan’s public-works spending culture. Now, he’s advocating what could become the nation’s biggest investment in urban planning in decades.  Two days before Japan suffered its record earthquake and a devastating tsunami on March 11, Prime Minister Naoto Kan appointed Igarashi as a Cabinet adviser on coping with Japan’s population decline and rural-region decay. Igarashi says the disaster has made clear the nation must reduce the role of its capital city to avert an even greater catastrophe.

“I told the prime minister that nationwide dispersal is the first thing we need to do as we rebuild,” Igarashi, a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo, said in an interview after meeting with Kan last week. “We have no idea when the big one’s going to hit Tokyo, but when it does, it’s going to annihilate the entire country because everything is here.”

To start with, Igarashi is pressing for a reconstruction package of at least 20 trillion yen ($246 billion), a figure that matches calls from Diet members from both the ruling and largest opposition party. Such an effort would amount to almost half the 44.3 trillion yen cap on bond sales that Kan pledged for the fiscal year starting April 1, risking a surge in yields should the spending be financed through debt.

Kan’s view is that while the immediate task of officials is to control the nuclear crisis, he understands the need for economic dispersal, said Igarashi, who was at the Cabinet Office when the quake hit. Stranded with no train service, he slept in a chair before going home the next day.

Another article on a related topic appeared today in Bloomberg News, March 29.  The focus is on energy supply.

Related Articles

Aftermath of a Disaster: Stay and Rebuild or Relocate?

Posted on by
3
Location Map of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture, Japan

Image via Wikipedia

Here is a snapshot of what residents face in one badly-damaged Japanese community. Quake-hit Japanese city in danger of dying. CNN, March 25

As of October 2009, 15,590 called Otsuchi home, according to the city. The Iwate prefectural police say, so far, the death toll stands at 504 people, with 1,048 missing. The police caution that the numbers are likely not accurate, because the tsunami wiped out entire families in Otsuchi, so there’s no one to report missing or dead people. Almost 6,000 people are homeless.  The choice to stay or go is complicated by the loss of the city’s leaders.

On the day of the disaster, Otsuchi’s city hall turned into a rapid command post. The mayor, 69-year-old Kohki Kato, led the charge to set up the command center outside the city hall, minutes after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck.
The mayor and his government had warning the tsunami was coming and evacuated to the second floor of the city hall, believing they were safe. The tsunami swallowed nearly the entire building except for the rooftop, where some of the city workers stood. More than half of the city’s leaders are dead or missing. Among those killed was Mayor Kato.

After the tsunami, a gas explosion erupted and a fire swept through the town, reducing the rubble to charred metal

Mismatch of Reality and Glib Opinions of Pundits:

The harsh reality of this situation suggests that recovery for some communities may take many years, if not one or more decades.  Yet many of the “experts” interviewed on TV shows, such as CNN, talk about the recovery– for all of Japan — from one to 5 years. Even a World Bank report states 5 years.  Many of those interviewed are from the world of finance and business, and of course their orientation is to focus on those aspects.  Since all too few people are experts in long-term recovery, for large cities and for nations, we are not getting the full picture, in my view.

Sadly, we lack a cohesive body of recovery theory and also lack a knowledge base of case studies of recovery, so there is no objective basis for discussing the duration of the recovery process for complex disaster events.

Related Articles

Recovering from Disaster – special problems of an elderly population

Posted on by
Reply

Elderly Couple Sitting Beneath Sakura Tree in ...

Japan’s Earthquake and the Hazards of an Aging Population; The Atlantic, March 23, 2011. Devastation in the Japanese countryside exposes a looming demographic crisis

Much as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina highlighted ugly realities in American society, the recent earthquake has uncovered a troubling side of Japan’s national life: the vulnerability of its poor, neglected, and increasingly elderly rural countryside.

You see this in the faces of tsunami and earthquake survivors on television. About one-in-three residents in the areas of Japan worst hit by the disaster are more than 65 years old, a significantly higher ratio than the national average of 22.7 percent. Some 22 percent of Japan’s elderly are poor, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Related Articles

Japan Nuclear Plants — failed to heed expert tsunami risk assessment

Posted on by
Reply

Once again, a case of hard science not being heeded.  Similar to the experience in the U.S. re the BP Oil Spill.  Other examples of science and researchers not heeded include New Orleans prior to H. Katrina and the Haiti earthquake. Lessons may be taught, but learning from them is another matter. See Wash Post article on 3/24 titled Japanese nuclear plant’s safety analysts brushed off risk of tsunami

A Japanese government agency that spent several years evaluating the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant declared the facility safe after dismissing concerns from a member of its own expert panel that a tsunami could jeopardize its reactors. Yukinobu Okamura, a prominent seismologist, warned of a debilitating tsunami in June 2009 at one of a series of meetings held by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency to evaluate the readiness of Daiichi, as well as Japan’s 16 other nuclear

power plants, to withstand a massive natural disaster. But in the discussion about Daiichi, Okamura was rebuffed by an executive from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, because the utility and the government believed that earthquakes posed a greater threat.

That conclusion left Daiichi vulnerable to what unfolded on March 11, when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off Japan’s northeast coast. Experts now say that Daiichi, as designed, withstood the quake. It was the ensuing tsunami, with waves more than 20 feet high, that knocked out the facility’s critical backup power supply and triggered a nuclear emergency, resulting in widespread releases of radiation.

The disaster highlights the government’s miscalculation in prioritizing one natural disaster over another and casts scrutiny on a review that more often reaffirmed NISA’s and Tepco’s standards than challenged them.

Japan Disasters – estimated cost of damages reaches $306B

Posted on by
1
Japan 5 yen coin

Image via Wikipedia

The estimated cost of damages in Japan is huge, equal to more than 4 times that of H. Katrina. See explanation at: Japan Forecasts Earthquake Damage May Swell to $309 Billion, Business Week, March 23.

Japan’s government estimated the damage from this month’s record earthquake and tsunami at as much as 25 trillion yen ($309 billion), an amount almost four times the hit imposed by Hurricane Katrina on the U.S.

The destruction will push down gross domestic product by as much as 2.75 trillion yen for the year starting April 1….The figure, about 0.5 percent of the 530 trillion yen economy, reflects a decline in production from supply disruptions and damage to corporate facilities without taking into account the effects of possible power outages.

The figures are the first gauge of the scale of rebuilding Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government will face after the quake killed more than 9,000 people. Japan may set up a reconstruction agency to oversee the rebuilding effort and the central bank has injected record cash to stabilize financial markets.

Damages will probably amount to between 16 trillion yen and 25 trillion yen, today’s report said. It covers destruction to infrastructure in seven prefectures affected by the disaster, including damages to nuclear power facilities north of Tokyo. Wider implications on the economy, including how radiation will affect food and water supply, are not included in the estimate.

Related Articles

Where Is Superman When We Need Him?

Posted on by
Reply

Where are the great leaders who can handle a catastrophic disaster?  What are the characteristics and needed experience for such people?  Some major research is needed on leadership for major and catastrophic disasters, especially those with unusual dimensions like the Japan disasters.

Many years ago, when I read comic books, the Superman character had great appeal. You may recall that the mild-mannered reporter named Clark Kent often ducked into a phone booth to achieve his transformation into Superman – the strongman with Krypton-endowed super powers.  The boldly-dressed hero emerged from the booth to take on the big challenge of the day. [More bio info for Superman can be found here.]

We sure could use him today, to lead the way out of catastrophic disasters, though I expect he would not enjoy the paperwork attendant with the job.  Somehow, people still have the expectation that their ordinarily leaders will go through the transformation to a super-leader. Here’s the bad news: when you elect a Clark Kent to a major city, state or national office, you do not get Superman to take the lead for events with extraordinary circumstances. If you are lucky you will get a competent manager, and if you are not you will get a person who crumbles under the weight of the new job. (A practical problem is that we no longer have any phonebooths!)

So, if we are going to have mere mortals lead us and successfully manage disaster response and recovery, we had better do a better job of recruiting and training them for extraordinary duty.

Buyouts after a disaster — may be the most cost-effective recovery option

Posted on by
Reply
Hurricane Katrina Video from NASA GOES Satellite

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr

From a book review in BusinessWeek.com, March 17, a Harvard economist looks at urban life in the future: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Healthier and Happier, by Edward Glaeser.Penguin Press; 352 pp; $29.95.  Athough the book is primarily about urban planning, one quote from the review is worth considering:

The author’s prescription for Detroit, as well as Buffalo and Leipzig, is to “shrink to greatness” by searching for fresh advantages. What if they fail? Well, that would be too bad, but Glaeser believes cities are about people, not places or buildings. Does it make economic sense to resurrect Detroit when the cost of building a house is greater than the reward from selling it? It could have been cheaper, he notes, to hand every household in New Orleans $200,000 after Hurricane Katrina rather than pump vast quantities of public money into rebuilding a city of waning economic significance. As disturbing as this may sound for New Orleanians, there exists a far more disturbing thought: Glaeser may be right. As the latest U.S. Census figures prove, the city’s capital is disappearing in droves.

Related Articles

Japan Disaster Victims — returning and rebuilding decisions are fraught with conflicts

Posted on by
1

Decisions to return and rebuild, or not, in Japan are similar to those experienced in the U.S after major disasters. The article ‘Too Late’ for Some Tsunami Victims to Rebuild in Japan presents some of the conflicts inherent in that decision; NY Times, March 19.  A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city’s seafront and not a little of its inland, some of the shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, the first signs of restoration.  Will they stay and rebuild or not?  Among the factors to consider:

“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.” Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.

“There’s really no economic engine in these communities,” said Mr. Aldrich, whose 2010 book “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West” details the government’s strategy for locating reactors in struggling areas. “These facilities bring $20 million or more to depopulating, dying towns. Many people saw these power plants as economic lifelines at a time when their towns are dying.” And they were, until an earthquake and tsunami changed the economic equation last week.

Now at least one of the Fukushima complexes appears destined never to reopen. Part of the prefecture could remain off limits for years because of radiation. The future of similar plants could be thrown into doubt, along with the jobs and supporting businesses that sprung up around the nuclear industry.

… the tsunami wiped out thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of homes, many of them owned by retirees who lack the spirit or money to rebuild. And Mr. Aldrich — also the author of a long-term study of the societal impact of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — says the dislocation caused by the tsunami threatens to permanently rend the social fabric that keeps many coastal villages afloat in hard times.

“We faced exactly the same question after Katrina,” said John Campbell, an expert on aging at the University of Michigan and visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. “There was a big discussion about whether we should rebuild the Ninth Ward, since it was below sea level, and so on. In terms of economic rationality, it didn’t make any sense, really. But on the other hand, it’s where these people lived, and there were emotional reasons to do it. “These villages may not have the same sentimental attachment. Nonetheless, there’s an emotional argument that’s going to be made, and I think it will be a potent one.”

Thanks to Bill Cumming for pointing out this article.

See also another NYT article, same date, titled Reeling from Crises.

Related Articles

Japan Disasters — risk management explained

Posted on by
2

“Why Plan B Often Works Out Badly.” Interesting explanation of Risk Management, from MSNBC commentator, March 18, 2011. Two quotes follow:

Engineers used to talk about guarding against the “single point of failure” when designing critical systems like aircraft control systems or nuclear power plants. But rarely does one mistake or event cause a catastrophe. As we’ve seen in Japan, disaster is usually a function of multiple mistakes and a string of bad luck, often called an “event cascade” or “propagating failures.”

Defending against and preparing for such event cascades is a problem that vexes all kinds of systems designers, from airplane engineers to anti-terrorism planners.  There’s a simple reason, according to Peter Neumann, principal scientist at the Computer Science Lab at SRI International, a not-for-profit research institute. Emergency drills and stress tests aside, Neumann said, there is no good way to simulate a real emergency and its unpredictable consequences. Making matters worse is the ever-increasing interconnectedness of systems, which leads to cascading failures, and the fact that preventative maintenance is a dying art.

Thanks to Anne Strauss for calling it to my attention.

____________________________

Of general interst, the posting today (March 20) by blogger Phil Palin on the Japan Disasters.