Re: [tlug] Thoughts and prayers from America

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

NGOs?

Sorry, I don't have any good suggestions.  At the moment, there are two Japans.
The one I live in, which is experiencing mild to serious
inconvenience, and the one
you're seeing on TV, which only trained professionals are equipped to
even get to,
let alone do anything helpful.  Fortunately, the survivors do have
reasonable shelter
but they're more or less isolated; the transportation system took a
really big hit, and
the "modern" communication system, too.  Ie, cellphones are spotty to useless
throughout eastern Japan due to high demand and destruction of towers and nodes.
Landlines and Internet seem fine if they work at all, though.  Some
places can be
reached only by helicopter and snowmobile, but those are pretty rare.
Trains are
not yet running (as of noon today) in Tohoku at all, and many roads
are severed by
landslides or bridge collapses, or a few feet deep in mud and debris
deposited by
a tsunami.

What we're seeing here on ordinary TV doesn't say anything about NGOs, although
they may be involved.  Somebody, mostly the local governments, I
think, is doing a
good job of getting drinking water and food to people as far as I can
tell, but heat
and all the myriad of other uses of water are lacking from eastern
Tokyo to Hokkaido.
Power is out in most of Tohoku and a few pockets in the rest of
Eastern Japan for
sure, and I suspect in Nagano and Niigata, which are getting pounded by smaller
earthquakes.  (There's one poor town in Nagano called Sakae -- I
suspect if there
was an M6 in Vatican City, Sakae would feel a "weak 5" shindo, it tops
the charts
for almost every reportable quake on the Japan Sea side.)

But that's mostly about infrastructure.  I guess if you can find an
NGO that proposes
to bring in portable electric generators, heaters, and cell towers, it
might be worth
supporting that one in the immediate future.

Speaking of aftershocks, throughout this morning I was still feeling
them in Tsuchiura-
shi (Ibaraki-ken).  I'm not feeling them in my condo in Tsukuba, but
it has the latest
anti-quake structure.  I imagine they continue, I just don't feel them
through the
building's buffers.  I hope we're through the worst now, but the
tsunami warning is still
up (although the whole Pacific coast is now at the "listen for news"
level instead of the
"get the heck out of there" level), and there were quakes severe enough to be
announced by the early warning network offshore at Sendai and
Ibaraki-ken as recently
as 6 hours ago.  Even geologically we're not back to normality yet.
The good news is
that the weather is gradually getting warmer.

The thing is that the survivors are mostly doing OK, except in the
coldest parts of
Tohoku and Niigata, I think, and of course the older people.  It's
kind of horrifying to
think about what that means.

I wrote to somebody, maybe this list, that the casualties would
probably top 100.  As
you know, the government is already admitting to over 1000, with 733
missing.  And what
they don't count in there yet is at least one town of several
thousand, *none* of whose
residents has been contacted.  But I wasn't all that wrong, I only
missed one thing.  Ie, earthquakes, nowadays in countries like Japan,
are retail killers.  It's the tsunamis that
account for 90% or more of the deaths (and they have a long reach -- a
tsunami from
this quake took at least one life in Los Angeles).

I'm sure you've seen some of the footage.  We've seen more, probably, and it's
sickening.  A big tsunami really does "sweep everything before it".
There are a few
stories of miracles, but basically, the only way to survive a tsunami
like these is to
be far away when it gets here.  Have you ever seen a Japanese house
just after the
foundation is laid?  For a typical small family home, there will be
about a dozen square
concrete pads in the dirt to support the main pillars.  Well, that's
what these towns
(several were wiped out by tsunamis) remind me of: regularly spaced
concrete pads to
support new construction.  But each "pad" is the whole foundation of
what used to
be somebody's home!  And the debris left behind is ground to a fine
powder; it really
looks more like a construction site than a disaster area at the scale
of the aerial photos.
Up close, it's horrible.

What we don't see are pictures of rescues and first aid.  One has to
suspect there
isn't a lot of either in the areas visited by a tsunami.

I don't know, Josh.  I guess I would go with the usual suspects, like
the Red Cross.  Or
come back to Japan, get a job, and pay taxes so the government can repair the
infrastructure. :-/

Maybe somebody else has some good suggestions, though.

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

> Stephen (or anyone else in the know), where would donations do the
> most good? I know there are countless NGOs mobilising, but it is hard
> to know which ones are performing the most critical functions.
>
> Cheers,
> Josh
>
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