Monthly Archives: April 2011

Response to Tornadoes is a Test of FEMA

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Response to Tornadoes a Test of FEMA;  WashPost, April 29, 2011.  In addition to describing the visit of President Obama and FEMA Dir. Craig Fugate, the article goes on to note:

FEMA’s image is still suffering in the south following its botched response to Hurricane Katrina and other deadly storms in 2005. Fugate stressed that his agency “is in a support role” and taking cues from state leaders.

Federal assistance would be “for recovery activities,” Fugate said. “That would come from the governor through our regional offices and then to the president.”

The storms come as the federal government is monitoring the first-ever major earthquake drill across 11 midwestern states, including storm-ravaged Alabama and Tennessee. Fugate said the drill will continue as scheduled.

“We do have to be prepared for concurrent natural disasters occurring in this country, earthquakes being one of them,” he said, noting that FEMA is also providing assistance to wildfire relief efforts in Florida, New Mexico and Texas and dealing with the aftermath of severe flooding in other states.

Short-term Recovery Activities in Japan

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From the Herald Sun of Australia. April 27, 2011,  some details on the debris removal process and a novel idea for use of debris.

Japanese workers face threats from asbestos, dioxins in clean-up. JAPANESE workers tackling the Herculean task of clearing millions of tonnes of debris from last month’s earthquake and tsunami also face health risks from asbestos and dioxins. The destruction wrought by the March 11 calamity is so enormous that just removing the rubble is expected to take years.

Clearing away an estimated 25 million tonnes of wreckage is a vital step in allowing victims to move on after the disaster, which left more than 14,500 dead and 11,500 missing in Japan’s worst catastrophe since World War II. “This is an enormous task,” said Matoko Iokibe, chairman of the Reconstruction Design Council which advises the prime minister, and who suggested the rubble could be turned into landscaped hills.

“In normal times people would be able to use these parks for recreation,” he said. “During disasters, they would be used as evacuation zones.” Most workers now struggling through the sea of toppled trucks, twisted steel and tortured concrete wear face masks to protect themselves as best they can from inhaling toxic and carcinogenic asbestos-laden dust. “The biggest concerns are dirt, sand and building dust that can be inhaled and cause abnormalities in the lungs,” said Sendai city official Tetsuo Ishii.

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U.S. Offshore Oil Drilling Regulator Speaks Out

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First sign of the new regulatory office at the Dept. of Interior flexing its muscles.  According to Pro Publica on April 27, Chief Offshore Drilling Regulator Criticizes Lack of Oversight for Contractors.

The top regulator of offshore drilling said this week that his agency is exploring expanding its oversight to include thousands of contractors on offshore rigs. The majority of offshore oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico are contractors and the their central role in safety issues came into focus after last year’s Gulf oil spill. BP had leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from the contractor Transocean and relied on the contractor Halliburton to provide casing for the Macondo well.

The government currently regulates only operators of offshore drilling rigs, such as BP, and in turn holds them responsible for any contractors they hire. Experts say that by delegating the supervision of contractors the government is essentially taking the word of rig operators that facilities are safe and comply with regulation.As Reuters reported Monday, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, Michael Bromwich, said he thinks his agency has the authority to oversee contractors and that he intends to do so.

Brownwich expanded on his comments Tuesday at a recruiting event at Columbia University attended by a ProPublica reporter. “It makes absolutely no sense to me why we should not regulate contractors as well as operators,” said Bromwich. “Historically we have only gone against the operator. My question is: why?”

Overseeing contractors could drastically expand Bromwich’s mandate, and it’s not clear whether his agency has sufficient resources to do it.

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In Japan, Nuclear Plant Problem Was Known before Disaster Hit

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There is a lengthy feature article on the front page of  the NYTimes today titled  Culture of Complicity Tied to Stricken Nuclear Plant. Once again, the issue of appropriate and stringent regulation is at the heart of the problem.

Given the fierce insularity of Japan’s nuclear industry, it was perhaps fitting that an outsider exposed the most serious safety cover-up in the history of Japanese nuclear power. It took place at Fukushima Daiichi, the plant that Japan has been struggling to get under control since last month’s earthquake and tsunami.

In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told Japan’s main nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being concealed. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs. What happened next was an example, critics have since said, of the collusive ties that bind the nation’s nuclear power companies, regulators and politicians.

* * * Already, many Japanese and Western experts argue that inconsistent, nonexistent or unenforced regulations played a role in the accident — especially the low seawalls that failed to protect the plant against the tsunami and the decision to place backup diesel generators that power the reactors’ cooling system at ground level, which made them highly susceptible to flooding. [Emphasis added.]

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Japan Recovery Likely to Take Decades – 2 articles

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Operation Tomodachi [Image 2 of 4]

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Clearly, the recent cascade of disasters in Japan will have a protracted recovery. According to a CNN article, Japan faces lengthy recovery from Fukushima accident, April 22, 2011.

The worst may have passed in the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl, but cleaning up when it’s finally over is likely to take decades and cost Japan an untold fortune.

A six- to nine-month horizon for winding down the crisis, laid out by plant owner Tokyo Electric Power this week, is justthe beginning. Near the end of that timeline, Japan’s government says it will decide when — or whether — the nearly80,000 people who were told to flee their homes in the early days of the disaster can return. Friday marks six weeks since the March 11 magnitude-9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that triggered the crisis. Some of those who have already spent six weeks in emergency housing … say they don’t expect to return to what was home.

Many of those displaced by the disaster have spent a month living in government shelters — sometimes just gyms — and are running low on money. Tokyo Electric has promised to make a down payment on compensation of 1 million yen (about $12,000) per household, with the intention of sending out checks by late April. Another 66,000 have been told to prepare for evacuations in towns where radiation readings are at levels that couldincrease the long-term risk of cancer for anyone who stays. That will certainly add to what is likely to be a staggering tab for the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric, the country’s largest utility.”We are mobilizing our resources in order to tackle the situation, to relieve the burdens on those people who have evacuated from the area,” Cabinet spokesman Noriyuki Shikata said. “We know that it’s going to cost a quite significant amount. But at this juncture, I don’t think we have come to a specific kind of budget size.”

Another article with the same theme was published by Reuters on April 24, with some details about the preliminary blueprint being used for recovery planning.

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Deepwater Horizon: One Year Later – 4 views

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Deepwater Horizon: One Year Later, covered in an interview in The Atlantic, April 20, 2011, with author of new book on the topic. One excerpt:

You write that “as Bush blew 9/11’s possibilities, Obama is blowing this blowout.” In light of the President’s recent “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future,” what lessons has he learned from the disaster, one year on, and how has he exploited them?

I’m a little bit less certain about my answer to that question. What Obama has learned is of course subject to being thwarted by the Congress. He seems always to be cautious about appearing too strident and trying to throw lots of bones to the opposition, to quietly peddle a wiser, longer-term vision. I personally wish he wouldn’t do that. The people who voted him in voted him in because we—I’ll say we—were really sickened by what had preceded him and what the Republicans were doing in Congress and in the White House, and we really wanted big, bold change, the kind of change that candidate Obama was talking about. I think we still want that, and his kind of soft-peddling the boldness and the change only makes the people who hate him hate him more, and the people who support him support him less.

I’m still looking for a fight out in the open. I wish he would continue to articulate a very clear vision about moving forward—about building the energy infrastructure, the smart grid that we would need, the new energy technologies that we would need, and creating an environment for new investors that would be much more conducive—so that American companies are not going to Germany and China to do this work.

So I’m a little less sure of what my answer is to what he has learned. I would rather that he would come out and tell us. I suspect that he knows and thinks all the right things, but his approach to the politics makes him look more hesitant, and then the actual politics make him a lot less able to implement his vision. But he’s not articulating a clear vision that at least half the country, who would be inclined to rally around him, can rally around.

Three more  articles, who of which feature graphics,  are listed below.

  1. One Year After the BP Spill: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t, by Amy Harder, National Journal. April 19, 2011
  2. http://www.nationaljournal.com/pictures-the-gulf-oil-disaster-one-year-later-20110419
  3. http://mediagallery.usatoday.com/The+Gulf+coast+one+year+after+the+spill/G2173
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Deepwater Oil Drilling Regulations – one year after the BP spill, limited progress

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It is not easy to get new federal regulations in place, even after a catastrophic event. Example one is the regulation of high-powered financial activities on Wall St. and example two is deepwater oil drilling.   Regarding the second one, both the NYTimes and the WashPost had one year retrospective articles in the past two days. Some details from the NYTimes, April 17, are as follows: Regulation of Offshore Rigs Is a Work in Progress

A year after BP’s Macondo well blew out, killing 11 men and spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the much-maligned federal agency responsible for policing offshore drilling has been remade, with a tough new director, an awkward new name and a sheaf of stricter safety rules. It is also trying to put some distance between itself and the industry it regulates. But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore.

“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”

Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be — promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.

Even the officials who run it, Mr. Salazar and the new director, Michael R. Bromwich, admit that they have a long way to go before government can provide the kind of rigorous oversight demanded by the complex, highly technical and deeply risky business of drilling for oil beneath the sea.

The seven-member commission named by President Obama to investigate the BP accident looked at the regulatory failures that contributed to it, and its conclusions were blunt.

“M.M.S. became an agency systematically lacking the resources, technical training or experience in petroleum engineering that is absolutely critical to ensuring that offshore drilling is being conducted in a safe and responsible manner,” the panel said in its final report, issued in January. “For a regulatory agency to fall so short of its essential safety mission is inexcusable.”

Many of those flaws remain, according to William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was one of two chairmen of the commission. He said last week that Mr. Bromwich was doing a creditable job, but that the agency still lacked the technical expertise needed to oversee such a specialized industry. “They changed the name, but all the people are the same,” Mr. Reilly said. “It’s embarrassing.”

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Recovery Pledge from PM of Japan – in N.Y. Times

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It is definitely unusual and quite interesting to see this OpEd piece in the NY Times on April 15, 2011: Japan’s Road to Recovery and Rebirth, written by Naoto Kan (Prime Minister of Japan).

The Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami are the worst natural disasters that Japan has faced since the end of World War II. Reconstruction of the devastated Tohoku region will not be easy. I believe, however, that this difficult period will provide us with a precious window of opportunity to secure the “Rebirth of Japan.”

The government will dedicate itself to demonstrating to the world its ability to establish the most sophisticated reconstruction plans for East Japan, based on three principles: first, create a regional society that is highly resistant to natural disasters; second, establish a social system that allows people to live in harmony with the global environment; and third, build a compassionate society that cares about people, in particular, the vulnerable.

The Japanese people rose from the ashes of the Second World War using our fundamental strength to secure a remarkable recovery and the country’s present prosperity. I have not a single doubt that Japan will overcome this crisis, recover from the aftermath of the disaster, emerge stronger than ever, and establish a more vibrant and better Japan for future generations.

I believe that the best way for Japan to reciprocate the strong kizuna and cordial friendship extended to us is to continue our contribution to the development of the international community. To that end, I will work to the best of my ability to realize a forward-looking reconstruction that gives people bright hopes for the future. I would wholeheartedly appreciate your continued support and cooperation.

More on Recovery in Japan – from Brookings

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Many hopes for a visionary recovery are adding to the pressures on those responsible for recovery planning in Japan.   In fact, I cannot recall another example of where so much is at stake. And it seems that many parties see the recovery planning process as a catalyst for driving needed changes in the economy, culture, and society of Japan.  I do not envy those charged with doing the recovery planning and implementing it. An excellent summary is provided in this Brookings report, April 2011: Recovering Nation: Battered Japan Searches for Bearings It begins as follows:

In the weeks since a shockingly destructive earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc in Japan’s northeast Tohoku region and spread turmoil throughout the country, it’s often seemed as if the stunned nation is fighting for recovery on three fronts. The clearest is against the sometimes enormously-destructive power of nature itself?in this case the tragic deaths, devastation, and dislocations caused by the tsunami, and the knock-on effects especially at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility. The second is the debilitating stereotype, prevalent both at home and abroad over the past several years, of a dysfunctional political-economic culture that has put the nation on a bullet train destined for decline, and which? the false label has it? would inevitably render the government incapable of effectively responding to the crisis. The third, just now coming into renewed focus, is the array of genuine, often self-imposed economic and political log jams that in recent decades have been slowly sapping the country of vitality, and which, if left in place, could ultimately undercut even the best-laid plans for post-tsunami reconstruction.

Blue-ribbbon Panel Set Up to Guide Recovery Planning in Japan

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A new, high-level special panel has been established to guide the recovery process in Japan.  In the U.S., such blue-ribbon panels also have been used effectively, after a disaster. From the Asahi news service: New panel to offer post-quake reconstruction vision, April 13, 2011. The composition of the panel is quite interesting.

The government set up a panel Monday to develop a big-picture national reconstruction plan following the Great East Japan Earthquake. Makoto Iokibe, president of the National Defense Academy of Japan, was named chairman of the panel, which is expected to compile its first package of proposals in June.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan met with Iokibe for about 50 minutes Monday and told him, “We hope that a good blueprint can be presented to us because the public has high expectations.” At a Monday news conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said, “It will be important to put together a comprehensive vision that will give hope to the disaster victims and that can be shared by the entire public.” Architect Tadao Ando and Takashi Mikuriya, a political science professor at the University of Tokyo, were chosen as deputy chairmen.

Among the 12 members appointed to the panel are the governors of the three prefectures that suffered the greatest damage–Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.

Thanks to Phil Palin for calling my attention to this source.